Babe Ruth

George Herman Ruth, Jr. was born on February 6, 1895 in Baltimore. He was best known as "Babe" Ruth and nicknamed "the Bambino" and "the Sultan of Swat", was an American Major League baseball player from 1914–1935. In 1936, Ruth became one of the first five players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Ruth has since become regarded as one of the greatest sports heroes in American culture. He has been named the greatest baseball player in history in various surveys and rankings, and his home run hitting prowess and charismatic personality made him a larger than life figure in the "Roaring Twenties". In 1998, The Sporting News ranked Ruth number one on the list of "Baseball's 100 Greatest Players". In 1999, baseball fans named Ruth to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. In 1969, he was named baseball's Greatest Player Ever in a ballot commemorating the 100th anniversary of professional baseball. In 1993, the Associated Press reported that Muhammad Ali was tied with Babe Ruth as the most recognized athletes, out of over 800 dead or alive athletes, in America. In a 1999 ESPN poll, he was ranked as the third-greatest US athlete of the century, behind Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali. Ruth was the first player to hit 60 home runs in one season (1927), setting the season record which stood until broken by Roger Maris in 1961. Ruth's lifetime total of 714 home runs at his retirement in 1935 was a record, until first surpassed by Hank Aaron in 1974. He was died on August 16, 1948.

Images of Babe Ruth

The American League Eastern Division

The American League Eastern Division is one of Major League Baseball's six divisions (An Eastern, Central, and Western division for each of the two leagues). This division was created before the start of the 1969 season along with the Western Division. Before that time the American League had existed as a single league of 10 teams.

Four of its five teams are located in the Eastern United States, with the other in Central Canada. At the end of the MLB season, the team with the best record in the division earns one of the American League's four playoff spots. The most recent team to win this division was the Tampa Bay Rays in 2010.

During its 41-year existence, an Eastern Division team has gone on to play in the World Series 25 times, and 14 of those teams have been crowned World Series Champions. Since the 1995 season when the wild-card playoff berth was introduced, the AL East has produced the wild-card team for the American League in 12 out of the 16 years (the Western Division three, and the Central Division just one).

American League

The American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, or simply the American League (AL), is one of two leagues that make up Major League Baseball in the United States and Canada. It developed from the Western League, a minor league based in the Great Lakes states, which eventually aspired to major league status. It is often called the Junior Circuit because it claimed Major League status for the 1901 season, 25 years after the formation of the National League (the "Senior Circuit").

At the end of every season, the American League champion plays in the World Series against the National League champion. Through 2010, American League teams have won 62 of the 106 World Series played since 1903, with 27 of those coming from the New York Yankees alone. The Texas Rangers are currently the defending American League champions. The New York Yankees have won 40 American League titles, the most in the league's history, followed by the Oakland Athletics (15) and the Boston Red Sox (12).

Short History of Baseball

Baseball has a long tradition in the United States. The most popular baseball league in the U.S. is Major League Baseball (MLB). Due to its 162-game schedule, it attracts more ticket sales than any other professional sports league in the world. Teams play almost every day from April to October. The World Series is the championship series of Major League Baseball, the culmination of the sport's postseason each October. It is played between the winner of each of the two leagues, the American League and the National League, and the winner is determined through a best-of-seven playoff.

Notable American baseball players in history include Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Roberto Clemente, Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, Al Kaline, Stan Musial, Pete Rose, Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan, Mike Schmidt, Honus Wagner, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, and Jackie Robinson, who was instrumental in dissolving the color line and allowing African-Americans into the major leagues. Today, some of the notable American players include Derek Jeter, Josh Hamilton, Ryan Braun, Chase Utley, Joe Mauer, Roy Halladay, Alex Rodriguez, Carl Crawford, Tim Lincecum.

Baseball and the variant, softball, are also popular participatory sports in the U.S. However, unlike American football, baseball is also popular in many other countries, notably Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Latin American countries such as the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Venezuela.

These countries are represented well in Major League Baseball today by players such as Hideki Matsui, Magglio Ordóñez, David Ortiz, Albert Pujols (born in the Dominican Republic, but developed in the U.S. and a naturalized American), Iván Rodríguez, Johan Santana, and Ichiro Suzuki. Canada, where baseball developed in tandem with the U.S., is also well represented in MLB with players such as past greats Ferguson Jenkins and Larry Walker and current stars Jason Bay, Russell Martin, Justin Morneau, and Joey Votto.

American Teams of Baseball

In North America, professional Major League Baseball (MLB) teams are divided into the National League (NL) and American League (AL). Each league has three divisions: East, West, and Central. Every year, the major league champion is determined by playoffs that culminate in the World Series. Four teams make the playoffs from each league: the three regular season division winners, plus one wild card team.

Introduction of Baseball

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams. Each team consists of nine players. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the batting team) take turns hitting against the pitcher of the other team (the fielding team), which tries to stop them from scoring runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways. A player on the batting team can stop at any of the bases and later advance via a teammate's hit or other means. The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team records three outs. One turn at bat for each team constitutes an inning and nine innings make up a professional game. The team with the most runs at the end of the game wins.

Evolving from older bat-and-ball games, an early form of baseball was being played in England by the mid-eighteenth century. This game and the related rounders were brought by British and Irish immigrants to North America, where the modern version of baseball developed. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is now popular in North America, parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball, in contrast to the derivative game of softball.