Baseball is hard!
I've watched quite a few shows with baseball themes by now but i never really felt the urge to actually learn about the game itself, so it was all a big mess of pitching, hitting and running around the field to me...but now that season 2 of Oofuri has started i felt motivated enough to look up the very basic rules at least.
My first revelation was to find out that the pitching team is actually playing defense. To my amateurish mind throwing a ball didn't actually appear to be the most defensive thing to do whereas hitting it very much looked like self-defense to me. But no, the really offensive action in baseball is actually running!
Now to my untrained eye the job of a runner basically seemed to consist of running dumbly from one base to the next, it certainly didn't look like it took a lot of brainpower. But of course i was wrong again! Running is at least as crucial for the game as pitching or batting! Makes me wonder why every single baseball series seems to focus so much on...well, everything else besides running. What's especially fascinating is the fact that the runner is pretty much the most independent player on the field. That's because there are only very few situations in a game where running isn't allowed. In most baseball series it looks like running is directly connected to batting when in fact running after the ball was hit is only the safest - and therefore probably the most common - time to run. But in theory a runner is able to run almost any time which makes running pretty important for strategy!
Okay, enough about running...well, basic baseball rules are pretty easy, but like with every self-respecting game, there are gazillions of exceptions and then there are umpire's decisions etc...so i probably won't turn into a baseball expert in this life anymore, but hopefully be a little less clueless when i watch the next Oofuri ep.
My first revelation was to find out that the pitching team is actually playing defense. To my amateurish mind throwing a ball didn't actually appear to be the most defensive thing to do whereas hitting it very much looked like self-defense to me. But no, the really offensive action in baseball is actually running!
Now to my untrained eye the job of a runner basically seemed to consist of running dumbly from one base to the next, it certainly didn't look like it took a lot of brainpower. But of course i was wrong again! Running is at least as crucial for the game as pitching or batting! Makes me wonder why every single baseball series seems to focus so much on...well, everything else besides running. What's especially fascinating is the fact that the runner is pretty much the most independent player on the field. That's because there are only very few situations in a game where running isn't allowed. In most baseball series it looks like running is directly connected to batting when in fact running after the ball was hit is only the safest - and therefore probably the most common - time to run. But in theory a runner is able to run almost any time which makes running pretty important for strategy!
Okay, enough about running...well, basic baseball rules are pretty easy, but like with every self-respecting game, there are gazillions of exceptions and then there are umpire's decisions etc...so i probably won't turn into a baseball expert in this life anymore, but hopefully be a little less clueless when i watch the next Oofuri ep.