Pesäpalloa Peli - Finnish Baseball Game

Alright. I want you to think of everything you know about American Baseball. Collect all of that info up from the far corners of your brain. You got it all? Perfect, now throw it out the window, because you won't need it here.

I watched three Pesäpalloa peli today, and I still don't really know what's going on. But here is a short summary of what I learned today. Just saying, most of this is probably wrong. Anyways, here we go...

There are two teams and there are two positions: catchers (defensive) and hitters (offensive). Each team has 9(?) people on the field at a time. The field looks like this:

1-pesä, 2-pesä, 3-pesä are the bases. Notice how they are not arranged as they are in American Baseball. Actually, you shouldn't notice that, because you threw away your previous baseball knowledge. I was just testing you... Anyways, the fact that the bases are arranged in a zig-zag shape makes the game look super random for someone who has no idea what's going on (AKA me). 

Each base can only have one hitter on it at a time. The hitters can... steal bases... but this is rather confusing and I will get to that later.

The catching team spreads its players around the field as they like, each team does it differently, but there is always a pitcher. The pitcher stands right beside the batter, and to pitch he throws the ball up into the air. A "proper pitch" is when the ball would land right on top of the home base if the batter had not hit the ball. If the pitcher throws three bad pitches, the hitter gets to walk (and the other men on the bases move in order to accommodate him. If there is a man on 3rd and he walks home, it does not count as a score).

A hitter that is on a base can run pretty well whenever he wants to. If the hit was out of bounds, if something went wrong, whatever, he can still run. This is called "stealing the base". In pro pesäpallo this never happens  but I was watching amateur players and they do it all the time (the reason amateurs can pull it off is because the defensive team may not be paying attention or might not be able to catch the ball as well).

Okay, now if a batter hits the ball and it isn't out of bounds (boundaries are the outer lines in the picture. The ball has to land inside the lines, but can roll out. This includes the line at the very back. If you "hit it out of the park" in pesäpallo, you just hit a foul), and all is well, he can run to first base and the players move respectively around the field and everyone has a happy day... but if the ball is caught before it hits the ground, that's when shit hits the fan.

If the ball is caught from the air, the player batting is out. Any player on the offensive team that is out in the field at the time and was not standing on a base (AKA, trying to steal a base) must run to the next base. They cannot go back to the base that they were stealing from. They have to book it to the next base before the defensive team brings the ball to the base that they were supposed to be on. This is called "burning". This is the part that I am by far the most confused about. and it seemed that they were adding more rules onto these rules every time it happened. Take this whole paragraph with a handful of salt. It's probably wrong.


And that concludes my pesäpallo lesson for today. Below are some links to videos and the Wikipedia page about the game. I hope that you are more confused about the game than you were before! :)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pes%C3%A4pallo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TynjeWIoUY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vK49TOVZEQ