Pesapallo (Finnish Baseball)

[Young Drachma]

As the king of obscure sports, I've known about Pesapallo (Finnish Baseball) for a while now, but I couldn't seem to find video of it.

Until now. Here's a little Friday treat for you.

It's pretty weird...but the Finns love their game and say its better and more athletic than our form of baseball. Incidentally, they're quite terrible at our version and are somewhere on the bottom on the Euro "B" Championships (where the top teams make it to the Euro Baseball Champions, generally dominated by Holland and Italy, the only two countries with domestic leagues with any sort of usefulness in Europe. And I use that term loosely...)

In case you don't know what Pesapallo is...a brief intro:

Pesäpallo is a fast-moving ball sport somewhat similar to baseball. It is the de facto national sport of Finland and has some presence in other countries, such as Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, and Northern Ontario in Canada (Both Australia and Northern Ontario have high Finnish and Scandinavian populations). Pesäpallo was developed and refined by Lauri "Tahko" Pihkala, who based it on baseball and some local games, around 1910-1920. The rules have remained the same since, aside from some fine-tuning in the 1990s by the Pesäpalloliitto, the governing pesäpallo federation in Finland. The basic structure of the game is identical to baseball's. Pesäpallo has 3 out-bases and a homebase. Players use a bat to hit the ball out to catchers, then move from base to base trying to arrive before the ball.


Differences
The more significant differences between baseball and pesäpallo include:

The layout of the bases is different, and the playfield is more rectangular.
A batter's box is removed and the home plate serves as a pitching plate; there is no catcher. Pitches are thrown straight upwards, and the batter tries to hit the ball when it drops down.
The strike zone is rather different, and walking requires fewer invalid pitches.
Catching a ball in flight is not an out, but forces all runners not on a base to return to home base.
The batter is not required to run after hitting the ball on his first or second strike.
Hitting the ball over the back line on the fly counts as a foul ball.

The Superpesis is MLB for Pesapallo (literally, baseball in Finnish)

Anyway...I figure its not dominoes.

[Klinglerware]

Fascinating. Being that the "pitcher" stands right next to home plate when lobbing up the ball, I wonder how often they get hurt...

[cuervo72]

Very...interesting.

Not as interesting as one of the other clips though:
Beach volley, Helsinki (9.7.2006)

[chinaski]

hah, the uniforms make it look like a new entry in the twit olympics.

[thealmighty]

In one of the interviews I think I heard the words "I am not on steroids."

[Young Drachma]

I guess they had some practice squad or some NFL Europe guys go to Finland to show some kids football. Part of this video is in English...

http://www.yle.fi/urheilu/mediasali/...44102_wmv.html


Oh and and I was waiting for someone to discover the Beach Volleyball video cuervo