Baseball

The book I read to research this post was Baseball for Dummies by Joe Morgan et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. I'll start by telling you a funny story. I was playing baseball at school once without any kind of protection & I was batting. Anyway I whacked into the air with all my might & I thought I bet that's going a long way & looked to see where it was going. The ball came back down & got me right in the eye, I fell over with the impact & I was stumped out. I live in the UK & am 42 & when I was at school american sports weren't very big in britain. We were lucky we had an american lad in our class who brought in some of the equipment & got us interested in baseball. Around that time an alternative tv channel called channel 4 started screening things like american sports & that got people in the UK interested. No one person invented baseball & it's interesting that in the 60's at the height of the cold war the russians claimed they invented it although that's unlikely. The manager or coach is probably the most important member of the team as he selects who's playing & comes up with tactics. One interesting tactic is using a heavier bat to provide momentum when the opponent is a slower thrower particularly if he is left handed. Barry Bonds is probably the best baseball player of all time. In the old days in the USA black players were segretated into their own leagues & as a result many top black players didn't get the exposure they deserved. Nowadays almost all baseball players use weight training but at one it was thought this made you more bulky & slowed you down. Now we know different.