The game itself is fairly simple; it’s just that it’s existed in codified form for like 140 years and they have had to make rule adjustments in every era to account for the next game-breaking strategy, so the corpus of rules is huge.

Each team gets up to nine turns on offense. If the home team (which would be on offense in the second half of the ninth inning) is ahead when their final turn on offense would occur, the game ends.

Each batter gets pitched to until they hit the ball in-bounds, they get three strikes, or they get four “balls”. A strike occurs when a hittable ball (over home plate, between the batter’s knees and shoulders, as a rough approximation) goes past the batter with no attempt to hit, or when any ball is swung at by the batter without a successful hit in-bounds (so, foul balls are counted as strikes, except that you can’t strike out on a foul - however, if you do hit a foul ball and a defender catches it before it hits the ground, you are out). Almost all other pitches [0] are “balls”, and after four balls the player automatically advances to first base.

Getting all the way back around to home plate scores a point.

After the defending team gets three outs against the batting team, they switch roles.

There are a lot more details and nuance, but that’s baseball in a nutshell.

[0] A very famous example of a pitch that was neither a ball nor a strike against the batter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih_ovjbwQGk

Hit ball within 90 degrees of home plate position and try to make it to as many bases as possible before being tagged out (by a player holding the ball) or forced out by a player holding the ball tagging a base that you are forced to travel to (due to a runner behind you having to advance or it being first base if you're the batter).

When ball is in air and caught without touching the ground by opposing team, the batter is automatically out and any already onbase runners must return to the tag the base they were on before the hit.

If batter swings and misses its a strike. If a batter doesnt swing but its a fair pitch (over the plate and above knees and at or below chest) its a strike. If the batter hits the ball outside of 90 degree range, its a foul ball and counts as a strike (but cant count for third strike or "strikeout" condition).

If pitcher throws ball outside of fair zone, and batter doesnt swing at it, its a "ball".

If batter gets 3 strikes he's out. If pitcher throws 4 "balls", its a "walk" and batter advances to 1st base for free and any runners on base in front of batter get to advance 1 base as well.

Game is 9 innings, each team gets one turn at offense and one turn at defense per inning. Each team's turn lasts until there are 3 outs.

If teams are still tied at end of 9th inning, they simply continue playing more innings until they are no longer tied. There are no game clocks in baseball.

There is a pitch clock in MLB since 2023. If the pitcher does not pitch within 15 seconds (or 20 if someone is on base) then a ball is automatically awarded. There is a penalty against batters also for delay of game.

Before, the umpire could call this without an official timer but rarely did.

Fair, still no overall game clocks and this is not necessarily true of non-MLB games.

You didn't actually include the score condition, which is that a player advances to each base and then the home plate!

Was hoping that was obvious, but good callout!

Bases must be tagged in order by runners. And they can safely wait at a base without getting tagged out as long as there is not a runner behind them that must advance. Anytime they are offbase they are at risk.

Sports like cricket make it less obvious. They get a point for each base and can run back and forth between their two bases.

The rules aren't important. What's important is, it's linear. Every time I throw this ball, a hundred different things can happen in a game. He might swing and miss, he might hit it. The point is, you never know. You try to anticipate, set a strategy for all the possibilities as best you can, but in the end it comes down to throwing one pitch after another and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.

There's a lot of truth here.

As they say "In baseball, anything can happen, but often doesn't". Oh boy, is that true.

Also, baseball is the most random of the major sports in the US. Consider the playoffs, statistically, any team getting into the playoffs has an equal chance of winning the World Series. It's just that dynamic.

The other interesting consideration about baseball is that when the ball is out of control, is when the scoring happens. This is in contrast to most every other sport where control of the ball is necessary to score.

If the ball is there bouncing around in the outfield, and runners are on base, guess what's happening.

It's also why single players do not dominate that game. The random nature, and all they can do is get the ball in play. After that, good luck predicting it.

I love the game. I love the anticipation of the pitch, how the infield basically freezes and gets ready. My heart skips whenever the ball is hit well. Single? Double? Home run? GRAND SLAM!? Oh, nope, foul.

Next pitch!

Play ball!

There's also a lot of depth to the strategy of the game. Handedness, pitcher/batter tendencies, etc.

I'll never be convinced moving the NL to the DH was the right move for people who actually liked the sport.

Still the best series opener by a country mile.

> Is there any guide for us non-americans to help us gain enough grasp on the rules to, at least, understand the dynamics of the game?

If you've already read "no matter how many" and don't get it? Then no, you probably can't be helped.

It's not very different conceptually from cricket. One player throws the ball hard, another tries to hit it far away with a bat. If you hit it far enough, you get to run; if you run far enough before the other team throw the ball back, you might score some points. If you keep failing to hit the ball, you will (probabilistically) soon be out. If the other team catches the ball, you're out. If enough players are out, the teams swap sides and the other team gets to try hitting the ball.

The rest is details. You can find them in any of the videos or articles you've already failed to comprehend without this primer.

I’ll never understand commenters who ask strangers to explain how some of the top sports in the world work from other random commenters rather than looking up a basic rules video or something like that.

In the era of LLMs it’s even more confusing.

Because they want an explanation from this very specific crowd/culture?

American football is probably pretty straightforward at a very basic level. (And very complex as you dig deeper--coverages, penalties though even the refs seemingly don't understand them a lot of the time, man in motion rules. A lot it's simplified because at any serious level, players do their thing and don't violate most a the less straightforward points that much. I think rugby is pretty similar.

As someone who reffed it at a very casual level, ice hockey seems simpler overall.

Baseball--I don't know but then I grew up with it. You pitch the ball, you hit the ball, you get the ball into play (or not), you run around the bases. Again, lots of subtle points. To actually answer your question, I assume so. But I don't have one myself.

I think you have to differentiate between professional (or collegiate) level football v. less formal games.

Having grown up playing lots of American Football all through school (for fun, not competitively), I think the rules are a lot more of a spectrum. For someone to play for fun or even watch the pros, most of the rules don't really affect the overall understanding. There will be some plays that get reversed or penalized on some weird technicality, but it's relatively rare. Things like "offsides", "false start", "delay of game", "intentional grounding", and personal fouls seem like the most common infractions, and those aren't really all that complex once you understand the basic mechanics of plays like the system of downs and line of scrimmage. "Illegal Formation" and various others get ridiculously technical and complex, but unless you watch a lot of football (and even then) it's not something that will have much impact and the refs/commentators nearly always explain what the infraction was.

Now that said, I don't mean to undersell the difficulty in learning the simple structure. Trying to teach my kids the rules when they've never played an informal game and were watching NCAA games with me was a helpful exercise at appreciating the weirdness. It's not the most intuitive for sure. If I hadn't grown up with it and had that informal experience as a baseline, I'd also struggle to make sense of the game just watching it without much explanation.

All the polo-likes (Hockey, Soccer, Water-polo, etc.) are extremely simple, only complicated by definitions of fowls and offsides and the ilk.

Basketball, too.

I'm a born American and I don't know the detailed rules to football. Baseball is conceptually easy though. Football seems super messed up with a clock that never seems to end and a game that is 90% commercial breaks.

> Football seems super messed up with a clock that never seems to end

I'm guessing you haven't watched much football then. I'm not saying that as an insult or anything, just a guess. There are plenty of weird things about the game, but the clock isn't one of them IMHO. The clock always runs while the ball is in play. It stops until the start of the next play when a player goes out of bounds or throws an incomplete pass, but continues running after a normal down. Each quarter is 15 minutes of play time, and it's quite strictly applied, and it is always displayed prominently, so it definitely ends. The length of a game is a lot more predictable/understandable than a game like baseball where time is disconnected from game length.

It is confusing because if the clock says 30 minutes left the game won't be over in 30 actual minutes.

The actual time left in a game mine as well be RNG for all the meaning the clock has.

Baseball doesn't have a clock and doesn't pretend to. The game is over under very clear circumstances, 3 outs per inning, top and bottom, 9 innings per game.

The weird part about football's clock is how the last two minutes sometimes take at long as the first 13 minutes of the quarter, so if you're only half paying attention to the game while hanging out with people it seems like the clock is going down at a steady pace and then it just stops going down.

This is because the final few minutes of a contended game are the most strategically complex, as the teams are fighting not just for scoring and control of the ball but also for control of the clock. Usually, the team that's behind is trying to slow down the clock (minimizing time-per-play and maximizing actions that require the clock to stop between plays), while the team that's ahead is trying to run out the clock to seal their win (unless their opponent is likely to score, in which case they may want to slow the clock so they have time to respond, etc). And since the stakes are so high, the teams spend a lot more huddle time to deliberate strategy, as well as going for more complicated or unusual plays that often require more careful review from the refs.

It's by far the most interesting part of the game, but if you're only passively watching and waiting for it to be over, it can feel agonizingly slow.

Baseball is America’s national pastime.

That baseball also happens to be a sport is incidental.

The dynamics come from its being a pastime. At its core it has traditionally been unhurried and the game can fall into the background for spectators.

As a sport baseball is explicitly statistical with a sample size of 162 games at the top level.

Buy* an old baseball sim game for a few dollars and play a few games from start to finish. Finish a season or two and you will understand more rules than most Americans!

*https://archive.org/details/r.b.i-baseball-21

This article is particularly hard going because it uses a lot of slang and assumes a deep knowledge of the game.

The summaries always seem to be either “it’s two guys throwing a ball to each other with another guy trying to bat it away with a stick” or “a line drive is out, except when someone pulls a Boston reverse. In that case the guy is still out, but his team (which previously was out) is now in, but only if the ball was originally spinning counter-clockwise. If the ball is spinning clockwise, the team that is out gets an out, and an innings which they can use at any time if they are playing at home, and only during a time out called by the home pitcher if playing away”. There is no in between.