From 1867 to 1887 a baseball batter could demand that pitchers throw the ball either high or low. When the rule ended, the size of the strike zone essentially doubled. To balance the defensive advantage, batters were briefly allowed four strikes before being called out.

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Why Does “K” Stand for a Strikeout in Baseball?

The box score of a baseball game is filled with all kinds of shorthand, which is necessitated by the desire for a concise encapsulation of the contest and by the constraints of print space, since box scores were found only in newspapers for the first century of their existence. As a result,