Minor League Baseball

Minor League Baseball is a hierarchy of professional baseball leagues in the Americas that compete at levels below Major League Baseball (MLB) and provide opportunities for player development and a way to prepare for the major leagues. All of the minor leagues are operated as independent businesses. Most are members of the umbrella organization known as Minor League Baseball (MiLB), which operates under the Commissioner of Baseball within the scope of organized baseball. Several leagues, known as independent baseball leagues, do not have any official links to Major League Baseball.

Except for the Mexican League, teams in the organized minor leagues are generally independently owned and operated but are directly affiliated with one major league team through a standardized Player Development Contract (PDC). These leagues also go by the nicknames the "farm system", "farm club", or "farm team(s)" because of a joke passed around by major league players in the 1930s when St. Louis Cardinals' general manager Branch Rickey formalized the system, and teams in small towns were "growing players down on the farm like corn."

& (disambiguation)

&, or ampersand, is a typographic symbol.

& may also refer to:

Single (cricket)

In the sport of cricket, a single is scored when the batsman take one run, either following a successful shot (with the run attributed to the on-strike batsman) or when running for a bye or leg bye (counted as an extra).

Unlike when a boundary is hit (and the run are scored even if the batsmen don't leave their creases), scoring a single requires the batsmen to physically run between the wickets. This introduces the risk of being run out, so effective communication between the batsmen is vital. If one batsman attempts to run and the other stays put, then a humiliating run out is likely, but quick and well attuned batsmen may be able to run "quick singles" when other batsmen wouldn't. In general, singles are much easier to score when the field is set further out, but bringing more fielders in makes it easier for the on-strike batsman to hit boundaries.

Singles usually rotate the strike in a partnership, but because the bowling end changes at the end of an over, singles deliberately only taken at the end of an over are used by quality batsmen to keep the strike when they are batting with the tail-enders, who are unlikely to survive for long against quality bowling and whom an experienced batsman will normally try to protect.

Tuple

A tuple is a finite ordered list of elements. In mathematics, an n-tuple is a sequence (or ordered list) of n elements, where n is a non-negative integer. There is only one 0-tuple, an empty sequence. An n-tuple is defined inductively using the construction of an ordered pair. Tuples are usually written by listing the elements within parentheses "" and separated by commas; for example, denotes a 5-tuple. Sometimes other symbols are used to surround the elements, such as square brackets "[ ]" or angle brackets "< >". Braces "{ }" are never used for tuples, as they are the standard notation for sets. Tuples are often used to describe other mathematical objects, such as vectors. In computer science, tuples are directly implemented as product types in most functional programming languages. More commonly, they are implemented as record types, where the components are labeled instead of being identified by position alone. This approach is also used in relational algebra. Tuples are also used in relation to programming the semantic web with Resource Description Framework or RDF. Tuples are also used in linguistics and philosophy.