Sidearm pitchers—who throw the ball at an odd angle, sometimes very close to the ground—are a rarity in modern baseball, which often makes them more difficult for batters to hit.

A visual guide to identifying baseball's pitches, from common pitches like 'fastball' and the 'change up' to specialty types, like 'cutter' and 'slurve.'

A history of the rare, chaotic moments when MLB batters charge the pitcher on the mound

They typically occur when a pitcher has slung a pitch a little too close to the batter—though the exact causes vary, from quick tempers to longstanding grudges. No definitive account of these infrequent but highly visible incidents has existed, so sportswriter Jon Bois compiled data on 264 such moments between 1950 and 2025. The resulting 23-minute video explores the rich narratives leading to these charged events.

Some athletes warm up with equipment from other sports

Baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani uses a cricket bat; his teammate Yoshinobu Yamamoto throws a javelin. Quarterback CJ Stroud shoots free throws. The reasons are partially physical (it's good to exercise different parts of your body) and partially mental (it's nice to take the pressure off with someone else's game).

Before 1920, during the Deadball Era, a single baseball was used throughout a Major League game, leading to a notoriously dirty style of play.

How Shohei Ohtani made baseball fun again

To rise to the level of Major League Baseball in recent decades, a player needs to become a specialist in at least one of the sport's many skills: hitting, pitching, throwing, running, fielding. For decades, this specialization has made a so-called...

An eephus is a high-arc pitch usually thrown by position players filling in for pitchers in blowout games.

MLB pitchers were charged with benefiting from sports betting

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians were charged with coordinating with sports bettors to enrich themselves and others. In many instances, they shared the kinds of pitches they would throw at specific points in the game. Bettors then placed money on those actions.

MLB 2023 rules changes were the most dramatic alterations in decades, drastically speeding up the game.

A sophisticated data analysis found that stadiums with roofs or in cities that regularly have sunny skies are the easiest for outfielders to play in.

The 2026 MLB season is the first to allow players to challenge umpires' calls on balls and strikes.

Explore the data behind every Major League Baseball player's success rate with ABS, its new tech-assisted challenge system.

Fourteen ways to make baseball cool again

Baseball, while commonly known as America's pastime, gets a bit of a bad rap for being long, slow, and boring. Here are fourteen fun ideas to make the sport more interesting to combat dwindling attendance.

Check out a list of pitchers that received Tommy John surgery, an elbow procedure that can repair a pitcher's deteriorated arm.

Statcast, MLB's sophisticated real-time data analytics system, runs machine learning models in the 23-second gap between every pitch.

Why professional tennis players are so picky about balls before serving

Just as swimmers shave their bodies before competitions to swim faster, experiments show that tighter, less fluffy balls experience less drag forces when moving through the air and thus produce faster serves at the cost of less control. Players may select a fuzzier ball in scenarios that call for safer, more cautious play.

Some say baseball's drug problem goes back to the late 1800s

At age 32, pitcher James “Pud” Galvin was feeling tired and decided to take "the Brown-Séquard elixir," which contained a testicular fluid from dogs and guinea pigs, believed to invigorate tired bodies. It might've worked: Galvin pitched a two-hit shutout the next day.

Inside MLB's robo-umping experiment

Human umpires call roughly 94% of pitches right overall, but performance reduces on borderline pitches in high-leverage moments, the calls that shape game outcomes most. A professor and historian analyze early experiments with the full "robot ump" system that helped shape MLB's decision to implement a compromise "challenge" system.

The evolution of the baseball bat

Torpedo bats may be the latest, most powerful kind of baseball bat, but the instrument's history is long. This Smithsonian resource traces the bat's evolution from handmade objects forged by the players to mass-produced marvels of physics designed by companies like Louisville Slugger. Along the way, you'll see some interesting takes on the form, including bats referred to as "mushrooms" and "bananas."

Sabermetrics, the empirical analysis of baseball statistics made famous by 'Moneyball,' redefined how people evaluate baseball players, overturning a century of assumptions about which metrics matter most.

Every MLB baseball needs to be rubbed with a special kind of mud, provided by one New Jersey family.

Visualize how changes to lineups, driven by modern analytics, could have changed one of MLB's most iconic moments.

Every baseball used by the MLB only lasts about 7 pitches before it's discarded.

How pitcher Pedro Martinez helped reverse the curse of the Red Sox

The team had not won a World Series for nearly 100 years—while their rivals, the Yankees, had won 26. The Dominican pitcher joined the club in 1997 and helped lead the team to reverse the curse.

Minor leaguers once unionized for better pay, housing, and medical care

For decades, Minor League baseball players endured overcrowded housing, indifferent medical care, and all-night bus rides for a chance to make it to “The Show.” And they did it for as little as $4,800 a year.

"Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is 80 percent of being a successful hitter. The other 20 percent is just execution."

- Baseball star Hank Aaron (1934-2021)

The magic angle to skip a spinning stone is 20 degrees

The traditional shoreside activity—reputedly practiced by luminaries Shakespeare and Homer—can be broken down into its bare physics, from hydrodynamics and momentum to gravity.

Fantasy sports' roots go back to an 1860s parlor game that simulated real-world baseball.

Tommy John surgery, which can save a pitcher's career, reconstructs a torn ligament in the inner side of the elbow that would otherwise stabilize the elbow during throws.

The quarterback cadence is a unique quirk to the game of football

Only the offense knows when the ball will be snapped, giving the team with the ball the advantage. Common combinations of colors and numbers (like "blue 42") were codes for plays early in the sport, but are now used arbitrarily.

In 2001, Little League World Series pitcher Danny Almonte was a widely praised superstar until it was revealed he was 2 years older than his competitors.

'Out in left field' is an idiom used to describe an eccentric person, and some researchers believe it likely originated at a minor league baseball park in Massachusetts that had an unusual outfield.

Mo'ne Davis, the first girl to throw a shutout at the Little League World Series, is now a center fielder in the Women's Pro Baseball League.

Henry Chadwick invented the box score in 1859—and wrote off walks as a pitcher's failure

In 1970, Pittsburgh Pirates' pitcher Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter—a rare feat that was just the 174th in MLB history—while high on LSD.

NFL kickers are kicking the ball farther than ever before

A combination of training, technique, and new rules regarding equipment has led to a sharp improvement in kicking since 2020. Certain players are now allowed to keep footballs with them throughout the practice week and play with a ball of their choosing during games.

Major League Baseball, explained

Major League Baseball is America’s oldest professional sports league. Alongside triumphs, the league has faced scandals, including drug abuse and steroid use, shaping its path over the decades. Today, MLB embraces new rules, international talent, and a growing connection to legalized sports betting.

100 moments that shaped baseball history

Published in 2018 by baseball historian Jacob Kornhauser, this list examines the defining moments throughout more than a century of play on the field, from Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis purportedly throwing a no-hitter while on acid to Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier.

Toronto Blue Jays star pitcher Dylan Cease is a serious yoga practitioner, and even wears the number 84 as an homage to the number of poses in hatha yoga.

Tennis' weirdest rule (only for women)

At all but one Grand Slam, men and women played with the same tennis ball. But at the US Open, women were required to use a different ball until a change was made a few years ago. We break down the story behind that strange anomaly.

How baseball shaped Black America during Reconstruction

A cornerstone of the budding Black culture following the Civil War was baseball, with several clubs springing up in Black neighborhoods and leaders like Frederick Douglass cheering on the players, including his son, who played for a team in Washington. This detailed history of the early Black leagues unpacks how the game enhanced the upwardly mobile community—and why that fact led to the segregation of what would become Major League Baseball.

Explore some of the best baseball books, including Michael Lewis' influential 'Moneyball' and Bob Uecker's autobiography 'Catcher in the Wry.'

An exploration of what makes Olympic curling so difficult and strange

The sport is often maligned for its oddity, but this impassioned video argues it's one of the more impressive (and good-natured) sports in the Olympics. Sometimes labeled "chess on ice," curling at the Olympics uses 44-pound, 60-million-year-old granite stones all extracted from the same Scottish island.

Bowling was long male-dominated, but women pushed for change through the sport

The sport was often played on lawns attached to breweries and became a leisure activity for folks in taverns—mostly men, in the 1800s. But the game's highly communal nature attracted a more diverse set of participants who pushed for social change.

The gray area that makes PEDs seem like leveling up to hardcore athletes

Doping in sports is broadly condemned as unsafe and unfair. Significant controversies in major sports, including baseball and cycling, have been prompted by the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs, which are described as clear-cut dangers and abuses of the rules. But to many competitors, the line between a PED and the next smart technique to adopt is unclear. This podcast episode explores that gray reality.

When GPS and sonar are unavailable, submarine navigation relies on a fiber-optic gyroscope to determine the vessel's orientation and an accelerometer to calculate distance traveled.

The Wright Flyer was an engineering breakthrough, and modern aircraft still use the same principles of flight.

How is the climate like baseball?

A two-minute video taking a lighthearted look at an unexpected analogy, explaining why some people call carbon dioxide (and the other greenhouse gases) the steroids of the climate system.

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

Pickleball's popularity has created a power struggle

The sport's sudden rise has led to a tumultuous landscape with battles over governance, court space, and player rights. This Sports Illustrated deep dive examines the competing billionaires vying for control, the conflicts over court usage and noise disputes, and how a second proposed Hall of Fame is dividing the sport.

Excluding using another planet's gravity to redirect the object, it takes less energy for a spacecraft to leave the solar system than to hit the sun.