Baseball Pocket Billiards

Baseball pocket billiards or baseball pool (sometimes, in context, referred to simply as baseball) is a pocket billiards (pool) game suitable for multiple players that borrows phraseology and even some aspects of form from the game of baseball. For instance, although baseball pool is played on a standard pool table, the 9 ball is known as the "pitcher", the table's foot spot where balls are racked is known as "home plate", and each team or player is afforded "nine innings" to score as many "runs" as possible.

Baseball pocket billiards has been in existence since at least 1912, when Brunswick soberly described it in a pamphlet as "the most fascinating game of the twentieth century." The game has relatively simple rules. The winner is the player with the highest run tally after all players have taken nine turns "at bat".

Although never one of the most popular billiards pursuits, and more well known in the early- to mid-20th century, the game has been featured in well-advertised public tournaments. For example, in 1922, the Pennsylvania Railroad System hosted a large scale “Indoor Championships” sports tourney in Columbus, Ohio, with more than 1,500 contestants competing at 15 events, including baseball pocket billiards, for an audience of approximately 20,000 spectators.

Famous quotes containing the words baseball, pocket and/or billiards:

    Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.
    Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)

    A lot of pop music is about stealing pocket money from children.
    Ian Anderson (b. 1947)

    So wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness from the peculiar state of his disposition; and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand causes for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient to amuse him.
    Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)