Comparison of baseball and cricket  Baseball and cricket are the best-known members of a family of related bat-and-ball games. Despite their similarities, the two sports also have many differences in play and in strategy. A comparison between baseball and cricket can be instructive to followers of either sport, since the similarities help to highlight nuances particular to each game. Bat-and-ball games, in general, are sports in which one team (the fielding team) has possession of the ball and delivers it to a member of the other team (the batting team), who tries to hit it. The two opposing teams take turns playing these two distinct roles, which are continuous during a specified interval. This contrasts with "goal-oriented" games, such as all forms of football, hockey, and basketball, in which possession of the ball or puck can change in an instant, and thus "attackers" and the "defenders" frequently reverse roles during the course of the game. In both cricket and baseball, the players of one team attempt to score points known as "runs" by hitting a ball with a bat, while the members of the other team field the ball in an attempt to prevent scoring and to put batting players "out". Once a certain number of batting players are out (different in the two sports), the teams swap roles. This sequence of each team taking each role once is called an "inning" (plural "innings") in baseball, and an "innings" (both singular and plural) in cricket. The single/plural usage in cricket is comparable to the baseball slang term for a single inning as the hitting team's "ups". A baseball game consists of nine innings per team, while a cricket match may have either one or two innings per team. Other present-day bat-and-ball games include softball, stickball, rounders (both English and Irish forms), stoolball, pesäpallo or Finnish baseball, punchball, kickball, and British baseball. Earlier forms include The Massachusetts Game of baseball, which was similar to rounders, and Old Cat. Baseball is played in a quadrant of fair territory between foul lines. The official minimum distance from home plate to the nearest fence, stand or other obstruction is , and the recommended distances are at least along the foul lines and in centre field. This produces a recommended fair territory field area just over . Most Major League Baseball parks have fair territory areas in the range of . In contrast, Test and One Day International cricket is played on a field with a minimum width of and length , giving a minimum area of , assuming an elliptical shape.