Now, strikes come in a variety of forms. You could not swing at a ball thrown (or pitched, as the process is called in baseball) through the strike zone or you can swing at a ball and miss it entirely or you can swing at it and hit the ball foul, which is to say, on either side of the playing field; this, however, only counts as a strike the first two times you do it—after that you can hit as many foul balls as you want and they don’t count for anything except as a gauge of the pitcher’s frustration. A ball, on the other hand, is any pitch that goes below the batter’s knees or above the letters on the front of his uniform or does not cross over some portion of home plate. The person who determines all of this is the fat guy who stands behind the catcher. This is the umpire, whose job it is to decide whether the pitch was a ball or a strike and to enforce the rules of the game on a bunch of overpaid egomaniacs. The umpire is either, depending on which team you support, a judicious and serious solon carefully and correctly applying the standards of the game, or a stupid, fat, blind as a frigging bat jackass obviously taking money from someone somewhere to make sure your team loses. The general rule of thumb in these cases is that if everyone is mad at the umpire he must be doing something right.