For those who aren’t sports fanatics, you might have heard that the World Series is going on right now. I, for one, have heard a lot about the world series despite having never watched baseball in my life. You might have also heard how our own Nationals are in the World Series this year. I have tried to understand how this is an upset or how likely we are to win, but then I realized that baseball is extremely hard to understand.

The first thing you need to know is how the World Series Tournament works.

The Tournament is when the National League and the American League of MLB baseball match up to see who is the best team in the country. Each league plays each other until one winner comes out on top. This year, the Houston Astros won the American League games and the Washington Nationals won the National League games. So now the two winners are playing each other in seven games in their corresponding cities, and whoever wins four out of seven games wins the World Series.

The most important and vital skill to knowing what’s going on with the tournament this year is knowing the rules of baseball in general. Baseball is basically two teams getting a chance to swing the bat and run from base to base. One player running through home base counts as one point for that team. Terms like “singles”, “doubles”, and “triples” relate to how many bases a hitter can run after swinging before getting tagged out. There can also be something called a “grand slam”, which is when there is a player standing on each base and the hitter swings a home run. Allowing the team that is running to gain four points for each person running into home base. There can only be one person on a base at a time, which means that the people in the bases are constantly moving. If the team on the field catches the ball, then it is a strike. Of course, there are three strikes before switching to a new hitter. In order for there to be a strike, the pitcher must pitch in the chest region of the hitter and about a foot away for the pitch to be in a good zone. There can also be a strike if the hitter swings at the pitch no matter where the ball is.

Now that you know how a little bit about how baseball works, you can now understand the odds of a Nationals win. Most people have credited the National’s new winning streak with their positive attitude and confidence while being the underdogs. Now that they have become the favorite, however, they have fallen twice to the Astros so far. The last time that the Nationals won the World Series, they weren’t even called the Nationals. The last time that they won was in 1924 as the Senators. They were in the same position as the current day Washington team was on being down 3-2 before they came back. Hopefully, the new DC team can have the same luck as the previous team did during this year’s World Series Tournament.