Seventh Inning Stretch
The one scheduled pause in a game with no clock, and the oldest thing about a ballpark that is not the game.
What it actually is. Between the top and bottom of the seventh inning everybody in the park stands up, and in most of them Take Me Out to the Ball Game is played. It is not a rule, it is a custom, and it is nearly as old as the professional game itself. Many parks add a local song after it.
What somebody who knows the game gets out of it. The stretch is the clearest surviving evidence that a baseball crowd is doing something other than watching a contest. Baseball's pace was never designed as entertainment and its social function, three hours of sitting with the same people, is why the sport built rituals into the gaps. The recent rule changes that cut twenty five minutes out of a game were an argument about exactly that tension, and the fact that nobody proposed cutting the stretch tells you which side of it people are actually on.
The numbers worth knowing. Between halves of the seventh, every home game, for well over a century.
What people get wrong about it. It is the seventh inning stretch, not the seventh inning stretch of the home team's at bat. It happens between the halves, which means the visiting team's fans are standing for it too.
At Little League and travel ball. Little League complexes do their own version, and at Williamsport the hill behind the outfield is the ritual rather than the song. The point is the same either way: the pause is part of what people are there for.
Batter's Eye: look up anything in baseball