Baseball Wallpaper, #1520

Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is popular in North America, Central America, parts of South America and the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia. The modern version of the game developed in North America, beginning in the eighteenth century. The consensus of historians is that it evolved from earlier bat-and-ball games, such as cricket and rounders, brought to the continent by British and Irish immigrants. By the late nineteenth century, Baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball in contrast to the very similar game of softball.Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal of Baseball is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four markers called bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the batting team) take turns hitting while the other team (the fielding team) tries to stop them from scoring runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways. A player on the batting team can stop at any of the bases and hope to score on a teammate's hit. The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team gets three outs. One turn at bat for each team constitutes an inning; nine innings make up a professional game. The team with the most runs at the end of the game wins.Major League Baseball finally made it to the West Coast of the United States in 1958, when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively. The first American League team on the West Coast was the Los Angeles Angels, who were founded as an expansion team in 1961.Worldwide, Baseball is estimated to be being the seventh most popular sport, behind Association football (soccer), cricket, field hockey, tennis, volleyball and table tennis.[citation needed] However, in July 2005 the IOC controversially decided to drop Baseball from the 2012 Olympics.