AHC: Baseball Pentagon

Dorozhand

Banned
Your challenge is to make the accepted rules of baseball involve five bases! Bonus points if you can get even more.
 
Is there some precedent for this (save for an episode of Back to the Future: the Animated Series, I seem to recall all of a sudden). It strikes me that five bases would be a bit cumbersome and not given to a smooth flowing game. I could, possibly, see four bases, as well as home plate, but, once again, I don't know enough about the early history of Baseball to really say.
 
Is there some precedent for this (save for an episode of Back to the Future: the Animated Series, I seem to recall all of a sudden). It strikes me that five bases would be a bit cumbersome and not given to a smooth flowing game. I could, possibly, see four bases, as well as home plate, but, once again, I don't know enough about the early history of Baseball to really say.
Presumably he's including home plate as one of the five bases (hence "baseball pentagon" instead of "diamond").

Adding an extra base will make scoring harder (if the distance between bases is kept the same) or easier (if the distance is made smaller, so you keep the same total distance). But one problem is that we humans find right angles and squares to be neater than pentagons.

A nice thing about baseball is that you basically just need a field, a bat, and a ball to play it; just have impromptu markers for the bases (something as easy as "that stump", "that bare space", "that backpack", etc.). So it's easy to get a quick pick-up game going. In that sense it's like soccer, which has similar advantages. So like OTL, it will probably evolve from folk rules, and will thus have to deal with the fact that to the average person, a square seems more logical than a pentagon.
 
Is there some precedent for this (save for an episode of Back to the Future: the Animated Series, I seem to recall all of a sudden). It strikes me that five bases would be a bit cumbersome and not given to a smooth flowing game.
Oh, so like OTL.:D

If there was a precedent, I dont see why it couldnt happen.
 
Same reason as bowling?

At one point, "Bowling at Nine-pins" was outlawed because people were bowling when the powers that be wanted them doing something else. So, bowlers just added another pin and kept going.
(IIRC, it was militia training, but might have something like church that made the authorites frown on bowling. It was a LONG time ago that I ran across this reference.)

Perhaps this could happen in some way, shape or form to baseball?
 
An early version of baseball played in Canada did have five bases. From 19th Century Baseball:

Canada claims the first recorded account of a baseball game, which occurred in Beechville, Ontario on June 4, 1838, described in a detailed letter written by Dr. Adam E. Ford, but not published until 38 years later on May 5, 1886, in a magazine called Sporting Life. In this letter, the game was described as having five bases or "byes," base lines twenty-one yards in length and the distance from the pitcher to the home bye was fifteen yards. Innings determined the length of the game as opposed to playing to a specific number of runs. Fairly and unfairly pitched balls were described and techniques mentioned for the pitcher to make it difficult for the "knocker" to hit the ball. The differences between "fair and" "no-hit" balls were described and each side was given three outs per inning.
 
It would be interesting for sure. Were I developing it now I'd make it so the bases were 75 feet apart (as opposed to 90 now) for a total of 375 feet around, which is slightly more than currently with 4 bases, but not much. It might make stealing bases a bit easier (especially from second to third, assuming home plate was the point of the pentagon). You might also need to add an extra player to account for the extra base, so you'd have 10 fielders per side. Maybe you could make a rule that the pitchers never bat at all, so you still have the 9 man batting lineup (which makes sense with 3 outs per inning).
 
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