Various Types of Bat-and-Ball Sports

Description: Billiards are a wide variety of games of skill generally played with a cue stick which is used to strike billiard balls, moving them around a cloth-covered billiards table bounded by rubber cushions. Billiards games are mostly played with a stick known as a cue. A cue is usually either a one piece tapered stick or a two piece stick divided in the middle by a joint of metal or phenolic resin.

Facts: American-style pool balls, used in any pool game and found throughout the world, come in sets of two suits of object balls, seven solids and seven stripes, an 8 ball and a cue ball; the balls are racked differently for different games (some of which do not use the entire ball set). High quality cues are generally two pieces and are made of a hardwood, generally maple for billiards and ash for snooker. A leather tip is affixed to make final contact with balls.

Description: Golf is a sport in which a player, using several types of clubs, hits a ball into each hole on the golf course in the lowest possible number of strokes. Golf is one of the few ball games that does not use a standardized playing area; rather, the game is played on golf "courses," each one of which has a unique design and typically consists of either 9 or 18 separate holes.

Description: Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal of baseball is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four markers called bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond. Players on one team (the offense) take turns hitting while the other team (the defense) tries to stop them from scoring runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways.