31 May: Baseball

According to Onthisday.com in 1859 Philadelphia Athletics organised to play "town ball", a game which became baseball 20 years later. I could find no other references which mentioned this date as a significant one in the history of baseball, but we are in the middle of the baseball season. 10 facts about baseball.

1. Baseball is often referred to as America’s national pastime and has been since the American Civil War. Both Union and Confederate soldiers played the game to escape the harsh realities of war. In WWII, baseball became a useful tool. The US Army developed a grenade that was about the same size and shape as a regular baseball, which meant that soldiers who would have grown up playing baseball would find them easy to use. Baseball was also used as a means to weed out German spies. Anyone who lacked knowledge of baseball would be suspect.
2. I won't get into the technicalities and rules here but will mention three slightly odd rules I came across. One is that it's actually a rule for a pitcher to wipe his hand on his uniform before pitching; another is that before any game, the ball must be rubbed with mud to take the shine off - and not just any old mud - it has to be mud from a creek in Burlington County, New Jersey; and the final one I'll mention is that umpires are required to wear Black underpants, so if they split their Trousers, it won't be noticeable.
3. A major league baseball will need to be replaced after 5-7 pitches, meaning about 70 balls are used during a typical game. That's about 160,000 baseballs in the entire season.
4. Baseball games usually last about three hours. The shortest game in history lasted 51 minutes (between the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Phillies on September 28, 1919) and the longest lasted 8 hours 6 minutes (between the Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers on May 9, 1984).
5. The game has an unofficial anthem, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, traditionally sung during the 7th inning. The song was written by Jack Norworth and Albert von Tilzer in 1908. Neither of them had ever been to a baseball game.
6. The oldest baseball park still in use is Fenway Park, the home field of the Boston Red Sox, which has been in use since 1912.
7. The first-ever radio broadcast of a major league baseball game was on August 5 1921. The game was between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies. Harold Arlin became the first live baseball commentator. On August 26, 1939, the first TV broadcast of a game took place. That game was between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
8. It's a man's game. No woman has ever played in a major league game and the Baseball Hall of Fame has only one female member - a sports executive called Effa Louise Manley. A female player in the minor league, Jackie Mitchell, struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession in the 1930s, but rather than get her into the Hall of Fame, it got her banned from both the minor and major leagues (men are such sore losers!)
9. There has only been one death as a result of a major league player getting hit by a pitched ball. Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians was fatally hit in the head in August 1920 by a ball thrown by Yankee pitcher Carl Mays. The chances of being hit by a ball if you're in the audience is 300,000 to 1, even though on average, 50 balls end up in the crowd during a game. Injuries are common, though, such as “pitchers elbow” or torn cartilage in the shoulder for pitchers and circulatory problems in the hand or torn meniscus for catchers.
10. The country with the largest professional baesball league outside the USA is Japan. One of their teams, The Hanshin Tigers, is believed by some to have been cursed by Colonel Sanders of KFC fame, because after winning a game in 1985, the Tigers threw a storefront statue of him into a river.