Baseball is a team sport that is popular in the Americas and East Asia. In the United States, baseball has often been called the national pastime, and the total attendance for Major League games is more than that of all other American professional sports combined. In Japan, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, South Korea, and several other countries, baseball is the most popular sport by any measurement. Among American television viewers, however, it has been surpassed in popularity by American football and, in the South, car racing. Although the three most popular team sports in North America are ball games (baseball, basketball and American football), baseball's popularity was once so great that the word "ballgame" in the United States specifically refers to a game of baseball, and "ballfield" or "ballpark" to a baseball diamond. Baseball is played between two teams of nine players each on a baseball field, usually under the authority of one or more officials, called umpires. The game is played in nine innings in which each team gets one turn to and try to score runs while the other pitches and defends in the field, attempting to get three players of the batting team out.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball

Today's selected anniversaries:

1936 In California, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened to traffic. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%2dOakland_Bay_Bridge)

1970 The Oregon Highway Division attempted to destroy a rotting beached Grey whale with explosives, leading to the exploding whale incident. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale)

1991 Indonesian forces opened fire on student demonstrators in the Dili Massacre. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dili_Massacre)

1992 Absolutely Fabulous aired its first episode on BBC1. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolutely_Fabulous)

2001 Taliban forces abandoned Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, ahead of advancing Northern Alliance troops. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabul)

Wikiquote of the day:

"All the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind." ~ Kurt Vonnegut (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut)