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:
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)
“At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public’s pocket are the order of the day—indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue—the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.”
—Studs Terkel (b. 1912)
“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)