Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball/Outreach/Newsletter/Volume 02 issue 07

The Inside Corner
 
What's new with WikiProject Baseball: Volume 2, issue 7 – September 28, 2014

Around the horn

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Contributor: isaacl

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Derek Jeter poised at the plate. Photo taken by Keith Allison; uploaded by Staxringold and promoted to Featured Picture status in September 2009.

Contributor: isaacl

About

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The Inside Corner is brought to you by WikiProject Baseball's Outreach department. If you have an update to share, or an article to contribute, please sign up at the newsletter desk.

This issue's contributors:

Project news

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This month, WT:BASEBALL had a fair amount of discussion among its contributors. There was a discussion on navbox usage, specifically related to franchises. Also, members discussed what ought to be included in team/season articles. One editor opined that most of this season's articles are not up to par, as they lack prose and overuse tables. Another editor opined that there are two extremes in team/season articles, and ultimately, he prefers that the article's text discuss trends throughout the season. Ultimately, no consensus was formed, but the dialogue should help guide editors in future work on team/season articles. Aside from those discussion points, most topics on WT:BASEBALL were relatively minor clarification requests and notifications, which were appropriately handled. Onto article development:

On the face of it, this would seem like a rather lackluster performance for the project this month. However, there are presently several articles languishing in the queue needing a GA review, including the following:

Last month's issue of The Inside Corner noted that we are approaching 300 GAs, a nice milestone for our project. If we can get reviews of these articles, we should get even closer, and who knows, we may hit it and need to start shooting for 350! So if you have some spare time, consider helping out a fellow WP:BASEBALL-er with a GA review.

Contributor: Go Phightins!

Showcase

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A baseball field with player positions indicated
The nine positions on a baseball field

Baseball is a bat-and-ball game where two teams with nine players each alternate between trying to score runs by batting, and defending against scoring through fielding. A batter faces a pitcher, who throws a ball towards home plate; the batter tries to hit the ball with a bat and subsequently move counter-clockwise around four bases, called first, second, third, and home plate. The team on offense scores a run each time a player completes a circuit around the bases.

After hitting the ball and reaching a base safely, the batter becomes a runner. The fielding team attempts to get the batter or any runners out by various means, such as catching the ball after it is struck by the batter before the ball touches the ground, or by tagging a runner with the ball while the runner is not in contact with a base. Runners must advance around the bases as batters hit the ball without being put out by the defense. After the team in the field makes three outs, the team on defense takes its turn at bat, with the other team defending. An inning is completed when both teams have taken a turn batting; after nine innings, the team with the most runs scored is the victor.

Promoted to featured article status in 2004, Wikipedia's article on baseball was demoted in 2007 but promoted again in 2009. The article has problematic promotional phrases that give undue weight to a specific point of view (for example, "the game's rich literary tradition ...", or "for a team sport, baseball places individual players under unusual scrutiny and pressure"), and it can use updating. For example, "in 2004, Major League Baseball declared that its goal..." can be refreshed with the resulting aftermath, and the new wildcard rule is only described with a sentence added awkwardly at the end of the "attendance records and the age of steroids" section. Please do help with improving this essential article for the project. WikiProject Baseball thanks its contributors for all their edits.

Contributor: Seattle

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The Inside Corner : September 28, 2014

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