Strange and Interesting Facts about Baseball

Baseball was invented by Alexander Cartwright, modeling it upon the stick and ball game that he played then. The first known club match with rules written by him was played in June 19, 1846.

Each baseball game has 12,386,344 possible plays.

The odds of a fan being hit by a baseball are 300,000 to 1.

The shortest major league player was Eddie Gaedel, who was three feet, seven inches tall. His sole appearance in an MLB game was a publicity stunt.

The tallest player in Major League history is Minnesota Twins' pitcher Jon Rauch, who is six feet, eleven inches tall.

Baseball legend states that the silhouette on the MLB logo is Harmon Killebrew, who played for the Washington Senators, the Minnesota Twins and the Kansas City Royals. He was second to Babe Ruth in total homeruns.

A strange rule of this game is that before every game, umpires remove the shine from the balls by rubbing them. The number of balls that they rub before every game is around six dozen. The mud with which the balls are rubbed is also location specific. Ideally, it should only come from a particular area in Burlington County, New Jersey.

Fidel Castro was once a star baseball player for the University of Havana.

In 1965, the minimum annual salary for a baseball player was $6,000, just a thousand dollars more than it had been in 1947.

A regulation baseball has 108 stitches.

The very first baseball game was played on June 19,1845, across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New York.

In baseball, a "can of corn" refers to a fly ball that is easy to catch.

Robert Redford attended the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship.

In an effort to sell more licensed apparel, minor-league baseball teams were changing their names so often that the sport's governing body now limits franchises to team name changes every three years.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, houses the largest collection of baseball cards: 200,000.

The first perfect nine innings baseball game was achieved by John Lee Richmond on 12 June 1880.

Giants baseball catcher Roger Bresnahan introduced shin guards in 1907.

In 1897, the Washington Senators became the first baseball team ever to introduce "Ladies' Day."

The longest baseball game was between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Chicago White Sox and lasted for eight hours and six minutes. Due to MLB rules forbidding an inning to start after 1 o'clock AM, fans had to come back the next day to finish the game.

The average baseball only lasts about a week. Each baseball can only be used one time in a MLB game.