Definition
The ball becomes live when the pitcher is on the pitcher's plate ready to pitch; the batter, catcher, and the umpire are all ready; and the umpire calls or signals "Play".
The ball remains alive until it becomes dead by a number of different occurrences. Thus, the ball often remains alive even after playing action ends. Technically, the ball remains alive between half-innings, though no action can occur after the end of a half-inning until the first pitch of the next half-inning.
Read more about this topic: Live Ball (baseball)
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction.”
—The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, the first sentence of the article on “life” (based on wording in the First Edition, 1935)
“According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals—just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.”
—Ana Castillo (b. 1953)
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)