baseball

plural baseballs · alternative obsolete base ball · alternative dated base-ball

1. uncountableA sport common in North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, in which the objective is to strike a ball so that one of a nine-person team can run counter-clockwise among four bases, resulting in the scoring of a run. The team with the most runs after termination of play, usually nine innings, wins.

   It was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books.

   1803 (date written), [Jane Austen], Northanger Abbey; published in Northanger Abbey: And Persuasion. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: John Murray, […], 20 December 1817 (indicated as 1818), →OCLC

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   “Your father was the best baseball player anyone had ever seen.” Excited but halting, her voice ran on past all obstacles. “We watched him play shortstop, and my father said he was the best, and my brothers too. The Cardinals sent a man down to talk to him about one of their teams.” Like an ancient marineress, she would not let go. She meant the St. Louis Cardinals’ farm teams.

   2016, Mike Westphal, Cloud of Expectation; Book One: The In America Series, Xlibris, →ISBN

2. countableThe ball used to play the sport of baseball.

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   The reason we have for so long been unaware that the universe evolves probabilistically is that for the relatively large, everyday objects we typically encounter -- baseballs, flowerpots, the Moon -- quantum mechanics shows that the probabilities become highly skewed, hugely favoring one outcome and effectively suppressing all others. […] With such a skewed probability, the quantum reasoning goes, we have long overlooked the tiny chance that the baseball can (and, on extraordinarily rare occasions, will) land somewhere completely different.

   2005 April 8, Brian Greene, “One Hundred Years of Uncertainty”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 09 Mar 2021

3. countableuncountableA variant of poker in which cards with baseball-related values have special significance.