Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2016 December 2

= December 2 =

Baseball diamond.svg
I am trying to understand baseball - which is full of jargon that at present I have not found definitions for. It may be that the answers to my questions are in the article baseball, but I have only read that as far as diagram which although claiming to be a full and complete diagram is missing vast swathes of information.

On that diagram, what is the size of the diamond - it isn't marked - and is that from the centre of a base to the centre, or is it from edge to nearest edge? How big is a base? What shape is a base? Is the pitchers mound in the centre of the diamond? What is the plectrum shaped thing in what I presume is the home base (unlabeled)? How big is the home base? Where does the running batter have to reach to have reached home (achieved a run)? How high is the pitcher's mound and does it have a prescribed shape? If the outfield is grass and the infield is dirt, what material is the diamond? What does "distance can vary from 290' to 400 to fence" mean - will an outfield delimited by a fence be within the range 290 - 400 or may it be outside that range - smaller? larger? And lastly is the diamond actually a square with 90 degree corners? -- SGBailey (talk) 00:03, 2 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Bases are square. The thing in the center of the pitcher's mound is the pitching rubber. The "plectrum" thing is home base. Home base is roughly the same size on the non-pointy sides as one of the bases. The batter must touch home base (the white plectrum bit) in order to score a run. The brown bits are dirt. The green bits are all grass. The bases are usually white canvas. The distance varying means exactly that. Not all of the outfield fences are the same distance from home base. Not even in the same park. The right, center, and left field fences can be different distances from home plate. And yes, the diamond is 90' on a side, square. † dismas †|(talk) 00:58, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Oh, and to add more confusion to this whole thing... The outfield fences can be very tall! Take Fenway Park which is a great example of this and the distance to the fences. As it states in our article, the distance to the left field fence is 310'. Center is 389'9". And right field is 302'. But then in left field you have the Green Monster. The left field "fence" is a wall which is 37'2" tall.  Meanwhile the right and center fences are much shorter.  † dismas †|(talk) 01:20, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * And finally, much of this is covered at Baseball rules. † dismas †|(talk) 01:22, 2 December 2016 (UTC)


 * The article Baseball field also covers the dimensions in exhaustive detail. Regarding the outfield wall dimensions, This diagram shows the outfield wall dimensions for all Major League Baseball fields.  The history of stadium design is varied; in the early history of baseball, there were no outfield fences, most "stadiums" were just a field with some bleachers on either side.  It wasn't until the early 1900s that the first outfield walls were put on stadiums, mostly for fan safety (in the pre-wall era, fans would picnic in the outfield, and players would have to contend with them as any other obstacle).  When the first concrete-and-steel modern urban stadiums were constructed in the 1910s and 1920s, they were often wedged into city blocks and the shape of the field was what would fit in the available space.  Only Fenway Park and Wrigley Field remain from this era, most of these stadiums had quirky, odd-shaped outfields, from the long-and-skinny Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan to Philadelphia's oddly asymmetric Baker Bowl, to DC's Griffith Stadium, whose outfield wall had a bewildering array of angles and crenelations.  When teams moved to the expansive west and to the suburbs in the 1950s-1970s, we got the era of the "Giant Ashtray" stadiums: large, bland, behemoths like Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium and Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium with their astroturf surfaces and their perfectly symmetrical lines and symmetrical playing surface.  The 1980s-1990s ushered in the "Retro" ballparks, which had the amenities expected of modern stadiums with the classic "charms" of the earlier era, like Camden Yards in Baltimore and San Francisco's AT&T Park.  -- Jayron 32 01:54, 2 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Actually watching a game might answer a lot of your questions about game play. † dismas †|(talk) 02:00, 2 December 2016 (UTC)


 * I would suggest watching highlights before watching a full game. Anyone not familiar with bat-and-ball games might find it very confusing. Once the OP understands what's happening in the highlights (how runs are scored and how outs are made, he'll be in better position to watch a full game.
 * The diagram's failure to show the distance between bases is a major gaffe on somebody's part. My PC doesn't allow work with SVG's, so someone else should fix it.
 * Many of the OP's queries have been answered. To reiterate and elaborate somewhat:
 * What is the size of the diamond? Is the diamond actually a square with 90 degree corners? -- Yes, it's a square 90 feet on each side.
 * Is that from the centre of a base to the centre, or is it from edge to nearest edge? -- Conceptually the base are the points forming the corners. Second base is centered on its point. The other three are positioned "inside" the square. That keeps the base markers totally in fair territory.
 * How big is a base? What shape is a base? What is the plectrum shaped thing in what I presume is the home base (unlabeled)? How big is the home base? -- First, second and third base are square "bags" 15 inches on a side and several inches high. Home base (or plate) is rubber, basically 12 inches per side plus those two triangles which turn it into a five-sided object. Home was originally square too, and the two triangles were added because it was thought it would better help the umpire judge balls and strikes.
 * Is the pitchers mound in the centre of the diamond? -- Not quite. The rules specify the diagonal corners as being 127 feet 3 and 3/8 inches, which is very close to 90 times the square root of 2. So the exact center of the 90 foot square, if my arithmetic is correct, would be 63 feet 7 and 11 / 16 inches. The distance from the point of home plate to the near edge of the pitcher's plate is 60 feet 6 inches. The history behind that seemingly peculiar number would take another paragraph to explain.
 * Where does the running batter have to reach to have reached home (achieved a run)? -- Any part of his body touching a base constitutes having reached the base. Typically feet or hands.
 * How high is the pitcher's mound and does it have a prescribed shape? -- The rules are very specific about the maximum height of the pitcher's plate (the "rubber") and about the slope in the front of the mound.
 * If the outfield is grass and the infield is dirt, what material is the diamond? -- Grass also. Note that the shapes of the dirt/grass lines are suggestions rather than absolutes.
 * What does "distance can vary from 290' to 400 to fence" mean - will an outfield delimited by a fence be within the range 290 - 400 or may it be outside that range - smaller? larger? -- That factoid is misleading. The rules specify minimum distances of 325 feet along the foul lines (which, by the way, are in fair territory) and 400 feet to straightaway centerfield. However, a given league can grant a team the right to have shorter distances, for example in San Francisco where the right field line is only 309. For high school it can be closer. The absolute minimum at the professional level is 250. If part of a fence is less than 250, a ball hit over it is a ground rule double instead of a home run. Professional ball fields have always been enclosed, so they can charge admission and not have "freeloaders" watching. The first enclosed field was built in 1862.
 * ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:37, 2 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Compromising on my comment above, here's a video of the top of the 10th inning of the final game of the recent World Series. See if you can follow it, and get back to us with any questions. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:02, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * One extra note on the excellent summary by Bugs above is that the diamond itself can vary in designs. The one shown in the diagram is fairly standard for the professional level, but there is a lot of variation.  see here and here and here and here and here.  You can see from those images that there's different designs for the dirt areas and the grass/turf areas.  -- Jayron 32 09:53, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * The evolution of the "skinned" portions of the diamond includes Boston's South End Grounds in the 1880s, which shows the early tradition of minimal dirt paths between bases and at infielders normal stations, while Chicago's West Side Park in 1906 had the more familiar umbrella-shaped grass lines. Except for the wide dirt path between home and the mound (and beyond), the field looks very much like the typical major league field of today. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:12, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Octopussy
In Octopussy, were the octopus tattoos on Magda and Octopussy intended as an oblique reference to SPECTRE (which could not be mentioned directly for copyright reasons), or was it just a coincidence? 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:80FF:78F0:F6E8:3CE2 (talk) 06:35, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * When, if ever, did Fleming specify an octopus as SPECTRE's logo? And when did that logo first appear in the films? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:46, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * In this here clip from "From Russia With Love", you can't really see because of the lousy resolution, but Blofeld is definitely wearing his ring with the octopus logo -- which shows that it was SPECTRE's symbol almost from the beginning of the series. 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:80FF:78F0:F6E8:3CE2 (talk) 07:19, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * You might be best off to bring this up at a James Bond forum site. They might have some leads on what was in the minds of the creators of the "Octopussy" film. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:34, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Agreed, but I have to think that the point of the octopus tattoos was to reference Octopussy herself, a characters so named in the original story, before rights issues reared their head. I never read Thunderball, so I can't comment as to whether SPECTRE had an octopus design from the beginning. Matt Deres (talk) 17:15, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * So, no connections between Dexter Smythe and SPECTRE? 2601:646:8E01:7E0B:4194:43D8:DAB4:1C6C (talk) 03:05, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
 * If neither the book nor the movie claim a connection, then there isn't one. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:51, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
 * There are also screen captures of octopus rings for Fiona Volpe in Thunderball (1965) and Marco Sciarra in Spectre (2015) in the James Bond wiki entry for SPECTRE, as well as a big image at the top of the article. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:53, 2 December 2016 (UTC)