Daily Dose of English 211
Baseball
Daily Dose of English 211
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on BensLanguageLab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about baseball. Another sports episode where we go over baseball, I guess. Well, we go over a different sport from the point of view of somebody who grew up in the U.S. And baseball is definitely a very popular sport in the U.S. and it's one of the few countries where it is really popular. There are several large countries where it is popular, but the U.S. is definitely the biggest. Then Japan, then probably Mexico, and then there's a couple of smaller, more islands, I think like Puerto Rico, which is part of the U.S. Dominican Republic is also big in baseball. A bunch of Central American countries has really good baseball programs and players, and it's fairly popular. But I think the, biggest market is the US and then probably Japan right after it. I'm not positive on that. I could be wrong. And there might be countries that also love baseball. I don't, I don't know that I'm just not thinking of. But baseball is a a pretty old sport, but I don't think it's as old as a couple other sports. And it is about hitting a ball. Wait, that was a terrible explanation. So it's a little bit different than a lot of other sports where there are two teams that do very, very different things for offense and defense, right? So when you're on offense, so when you're like trying to score points, when you're sort of trying to make a point, It is just one person at a time playing against the entire other team, which is not really very common in other sports. A lot of other sports, it can go very quickly between attack and defense, or there's two different large teams. Like in football, you typically have an offense and a defensive team, where you basically have two different teams, but they're both the same size, they have similar roles, they have similar kinds of players and positions, rather, not roles. similar positions in order to sort of like a defensive version of a different whatever. But baseball is totally different to the point where there are many players that only play on offense or only play on defense, which makes it very interesting in a lot of ways. It's a very cool sport, in my opinion. It's one of my favorites to play for sure or watch. I don't really watch any sports, so I wouldn't say that I like to even watch baseball that much. But it's also, I think it's one of the more interesting sports out there. It is, and it has a bunch of different, because of this different sort of these two different teams that you have, these two different sides of the game, there are lots of different skills that you can specialize in or be good at. And they're mostly separated into like fielding, which is like catching the ball and being good with the ball. Pitching or throwing. Pitching is the person that takes the ball and throws it at the batter. And then hitting is another big one as well. Being a good hitter is important. And then also running. Being a good runner isn't easy because you can do a lot of different things to be a better runner. And different players excel at different things and are usually better at one thing and not as good as another or whatever it is, which is how you get players that only play defense or offense or whatever. I'm not gonna go deep into the rules just because they are pretty complicated. There's lots of them, but there are generally in terms of like the positions that are played, there is the pitcher and the catcher. So the pitchers, like I said, the one who throws the ball, the catcher that catches the ball and plays with the pitcher. And then there's the infield or the infield of the people that are pretty much just behind the pitcher right there a little bit further back. And their job is to catch and field balls that go relatively close to the pitcher, that stay on the dirt. And then to tag the runner and get them out. And then there is the outfield, which is everybody that's way back in the grass. And their job is when somebody hits a ball really far or really high, their job is to catch it and then get it to the infield. the outfield is typically where the worst players go in the younger leagues, when you're younger or whatever, like when somebody is, because it's a lot harder to play in field for kids and for teenagers or whatever. However, once you get older and older and better, a lot of people specialize at their position and being in the outfield does also become quite difficult because you have to be able to throw the ball. Not only very far, but hard and very accurately at a far distance. The baseball field is going to be pretty big and if somebody hits the ball to the very end and you have the ball, your job is to get it far. I don't know, like a hundred meters. Maybe not that far. No, that's too far. Yeah, it's probably like half that. But still, that's a long way. And depending on the size of the field, you might have to throw the ball really freaking far. And it better go fast and it better be accurate. So there is definitely skill required for every different position. And each position is quite different. There is a lot of similarity between them, but also because of how most people are right-handed when they hit, which means that they stand on the left side of the plate from their point of view, and they have the bat over their right shoulder and then swing, which means that more things go into left field. And just generally, because that's how swinging the bat works. However, the things that go into right field are a little bit different. They usually are a little bit faster. There's a lot of different things about every single position that make them a little bit different, a little bit more unique, I guess, which is something that's also really interesting about baseball. And then hitting is also very hard, right? Especially in when you get when people get better and better professional players throw it like 100 miles an hour, which is very fast and trying to hit a little baseball at that speed accurately is very difficult. Then you also have to run and it's just, it's so, it's very, very hard to do. But the interesting thing about baseball is also that it is played a lot of times. And that's what I think really makes it an interesting sport, is that a season, you play like 150 games minimum or something like that. 150 games versus in the NFL, the American Football League or National Football League, which is American football. They play like 16 or 32 games. It's not that many. I think it's very few compared to baseball. I think it's like 16. I could be wrong, but it's not very many. But with baseball, they play against a single team, a whole series often, usually five or seven games, and they play against the exact same team for basically a week, and then they have a little break, and then they play against another team for an entire week. Again and again and again and again, there's a lot of games that happen. Which means that baseball, and also because baseball is really good, they generate a lot of statistics. And that is something that a lot of people find really interesting about baseball. If you go to a baseball game, you will often see people in the audience, in the crowd, tracking the game on either their phone or often in a paper book. because you can track every single action that happens in baseball. If it's a pitch or a strike or a ball, you can mark that. If they swing and they miss, you can mark that. There's a way to mark essentially everything that happens in baseball. And that is done for every single game because numbers and math are a very large part of baseball. There's actually a really good movie called Moneyball, which goes into the story of a team that sort of originally changed how they spend money on players, right? Because baseball players can be really expensive. I'm not going to spoil the movie, but I definitely recommend you watch it. But essentially they realize that if they look at the stats for players and they focus on some unconventional stats, they don't focus on how much of a star the player is, how famous they are, or whatever. They just focus on a couple of core numbers that most other people don't focus on. they can spend a lot less money and get better results. And it totally worked. You have to watch the movie to see exactly how it worked, but that shifted the sort of how baseball is. Baseball is also just kind of crazy. There's so many crazy stories that come out of the sport. If you want some more of those, the YouTube channel Baseball Doesn't Exist is really entertaining with that, about telling just some of the crazy wild stories because it does have this... different level to it, where it's almost a little bit like wrestling, like big, whatever it's called, WWE wrestling, where everybody knows that it's fake, but that's kind of the point, right? It's like, it's part of this bigger story, and like, they do big things, and like, there's big, crazy events and stuff, and everybody's excited about that, even though they all know that it's not real. That's not the point. um baseball is a real sport but it also has this like air of of like larger than life characters and fiction and crazy stories that happen all the time like even nowadays right there's just tons of stories and and lots of really cool stuff happening um so if you if you want like a bit of a game with sort of a story to it You can just follow that part of baseball. You don't even have to care about the actual sport itself. There are a lot of people that don't really care about this sport. They either care about the numbers or they care about the story of it all. And so there's something for kind of a lot of almost everybody can enjoy something about baseball. It's also the fun to play like more usually slower when you just have like some friends the park or whatever or it's very common for Like offices or teams or departments or whatever to have like a team. I'd I say team. Yeah together so like the the fire department might play against the the police department or an internal like company might have a bunch of small teams or whatever where they sort of just play for fun and because it is a fun game to play, just for goofs. But yeah, there's so much more to go into about baseball. I played it for, it was the sport that I played for the longest. I definitely enjoyed it the most, also because I was better at it than every other sport I played, mostly at hitting. Yeah, I would love to play softball or baseball again at some point in my life, but that is not a current thing. But anyways, I'm gonna leave it there. I have to go, but I hope that you enjoyed this episode and maybe learned a little something. If you're a fan of baseball and like anything specific about it, definitely let me know down in the comments below. But other than that, I will see you again tomorrow. Have a fantastic rest of your day. Bye.
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