Baseball is a bat-and-ball game played between two opposing teams, of nine players each, that take turns batting and fielding. The game proceeds when a player on the fielding team, called the pitcher, throws a ball which a player on the batting team tries to hit with a bat. The objective of the offensive team (batting team) is to hit the ball into the field of play, allowing its players to run the bases, having them advance counter-clockwise around four bases to score what are called "runs". The objective of the defensive team (fielding team) is to prevent batters from becoming runners, and to prevent runners' advance around the bases. A run is scored when a runner legally advances around the bases in order and touches home plate (the place where the player started as a batter). The team that scores the most runs by the end of the game is the winner.

Baseball’s origins from various bat-and-ball sports are hard to trace, but it is commonly accepted that it developed in the United States and Canada starting around the 1830s with the US’ first officially recorded game occurring on June 19th, 1846. While the sport is nicknamed “America’s Pastime”, it’s also popular in Latin America and East Asia with a multitude of countries having their own leagues and many of Major League Baseball’s past and present stars coming from around the globe.

Major League Baseball’s lengthy history lends itself to a multitude of topics (racial segregation and the continued discrimination black players faced in the integration-era, Curt Flood sacrificing his career for the players’ right to free-agency, the systemic encouragement of drug abuse from greenies to coke to steroids to opiates all come to mind even before recounting any specific games), since far better writers than me have written exhaustively on those topics and this post is going live for an opening day delayed by labor disputes, I’m going to focus on the recent CBA and the future of the MLBPA in the oldest comment on this post (this is already getting kinda long).

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