I grew up watching baseball. I watched no other sports, just baseball. They adhere to many conventions when it comes to sports in general, and baseball in particular. When broadcasters (or website) list sports scores, they list the home team second. If the Dodgers play in Atlanta, they’ll list the LA Dodgers first; sometimes they’ll even say, “LA at Atlanta” for short. Though that’s just a convention.
The home team bats second in each inning; they actually wrote this into the rules. There are nuances in game play that extend from this rule. However, this is a generic rule about baseball. Major League Baseball established a few additional rules. As a teenager, I had picked up a book on the MLB rules, I had few other vices. I found some of the more obscure rules to be rather interesting.
The players’ uniforms need to be consistent color and appearance. Each uniform may have the player’s surname on the back (or no name at all like some Yankee uniforms); it may not be the first name. Ichiro Suzuki wore his first name on his uniform, but he needed to explicitly get special permission from the commissioner. Back in the 1970’s, Ted Turner owned both the Atlanta Braves and TBS (which was often channel 17 on the tuner). He propositioned Messersmith, the player with the jersey number 17, to change his name to Channel, so that the jersey read Channel 17.
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