The bases on a regulation baseball diamond are 90 feet apart. This distance was written into the rules of baseball more than 150 years ago, but it suits the modern sport perfectly. You can see it in nearly every game, when the time it takes to field a deep grounder and throw the ball to first base essentially matches the time it takes a typical batter to travel the 90 feet from home plate to first.
History
Baseball evolved from a number of bat-and-ball games, most notably a variation of cricket called "rounders," and the rules evolved along with the sport. In 1845, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club of New York, at the time the most prominent baseball organization in the country, put out the first written rule book. As primary author of these "Knickerbocker Rules," club founder Alexander Cartwright is often given credit for laying out the baseball diamond.
Codification
The Knickerbocker Rules didn't define a distance from one base to the next—from home to first, from first to second, and so on. Rather, the rules specified that the distance from home to second base, cutting across the diamond, would be "42 paces," as would the distance from first to third. If you allow 3 feet per "pace," these measurements give you base paths of approximately 89 feet. In 1857, the Knickerbockers and 15 other New York clubs gathered for the "Base Ball Convention," at which they standardized the rules of the game—including the 90-foot base paths.
Rule 1.04
Today the 90-foot base paths and the other dimensions of a baseball field are spelled out in Rule 1.04, which gives step-by-step instructions for laying out a baseball diamond.
Variations
The 90-foot base paths are the standard for Major League Baseball, the minor leagues, college and high school baseball, and youth leagues for players ages 13 and up. For players ages 12 and under, the Babe Ruth League and Little League organizations specify 60 feet between bases, although Babe Ruth's "Cal Ripken Major 70" division allows 70-foot base paths. Also, Little League allows local leagues for players ages 13 and over to opt for 75-foot base paths during the regular season, though postseason tournaments for that age group are all played on 90-foot diamonds.
Bases
The bases themselves are square, 15 inches on each side. According to Rule 1.06, they are to be white canvas bags, anchored to the ground and filled with "soft material" so that they are between 3 and 5 inches high. In baseball's earliest days, the bases were wooden posts pounded into the ground at the corner of the diamond. By the end of the 1800s, these had given way to bags.
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