Baseball is pretty confounding to explain to most non-Americans but John Grisham has done it …

BATTER UP

Assume you are a baseball player, one of nine starters on a team of 25 players. You are in uniform, and ready to begin the game. You are on the visiting team, as opposed to the home team, and you are the first batter (an offensive player). You walk from the dugout (the bench area where your team congregates during the game), and proceed to home plate, or home base, or sometimes simply home (a slab of hard, whitened rubber; odd-shaped with 5 sides but basically a 17-inch square, and installed into the ground so that it is level with the playing surface). For purposes of this discussion, you decide to stand on home plate and call time out. The game is played without a clock, but players and coaches are allowed to call time-out to stop the action. You wouldn’t do this in a real game, but bear with me.

You can read the rest via Huffington Post. PLAY BALL!