Mind Games: Baseball and Chess

Brown dirt covering your clothes, sweat beading on your arms as the blistering sun bears downs, and the signature smell of a cookout nearby. Chances are, that when you picture this description, there’s a baseball game going on. Now, if the setting changed and you were now in a silent room, tapping your finger on a desk with a puzzled look on your face, a baseball game doesn’t even cross your mind. That’s because this environment is ideal for chess! The classic game that’s objective is to see who can capture the other team’s game piece called the king. Even though the objectives and environments in baseball and chess appear to be polar opposites, both require a cunning ability to utilize a variety of similar strategies in order to succeed in winning.

A strategic similarity that baseball and chess share is the arranging of defense. In baseball, when you are on defense it is vital to constantly rearrange how your team is placed out on the field based on certain situations. Most of the time you are adjusting to the abilities of the hitter. Since every hitter has a unique strength, whether that would be hitting the ball to left field or bunting, the defense should move to increase the odds of keeping the ball from reaching the outfield or preventing a hit. For example, usually if there is a left-handed hitter up to the plate, the defense will want to shift to their right because hitting the ball to that side is easier to do and is most likely to happen. The same idea applies to right-handed hitters, only the defense is aligned more towards the left of their normal fielding positions.

Chess is very similar in that depending on which of your opponents pieces pose a threat to your king, you must align your pieces in a certain way to defen...

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...hess they will find themselves recurrently having success. Making the appearance that you have a plan for every move your opponent makes will surely mess with their minds and leave them contemplating whether to act habitually or abnormally. Your foe’s confusion will lead them to their own demise.

Despite the two games’ different objectives, rules, and environments, baseball and chess both use similar strategies in order to fool and overthrow the opposition. Strategically, both have similar ways to set up defense, to make a sacrifice to gain the upper hand, and to beat your opponent by playing one step ahead. So the next time you’re at a ballpark and smelling the franks grilling nearby, oddly enough you might start thinking about chess, because after looking past the obvious, you will see that the games of baseball and chess are more related than previously believed.