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Cliff Clavin at a baseball game
You see, baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played
between two teams of nine players each. The evolution of baseball
from older bat-and-ball games is difficult
to trace with precision. A French manuscript from 1344 contains an illustration
of clerics playing a game, possibly la soule,
with similarities to baseball;[1] other old French games such as théque,
la balle au bâton, and la balle empoisonée
also appear to be related.[2] Consensus once held that today's baseball
is
a North American development from the older
game rounders, popular in Great Britain and Ireland. Baseball Before
We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the
Game (2005), by David Block, suggests that the game originated in England;
recently uncovered historical evidence supports
this position. Block argues that rounders and early baseball were
actually regional variants of each other,
and that the game's most direct antecedents are the English games of
stoolball and "tut-ball".[3] It has long been
believed that cricket also descended from such games, though evidence
uncovered in early 2009 suggests that the
sport may have been imported to England from Flanders.[4]
The earliest known reference to baseball is
in a 1744 British publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by John Newbery.
It contains a rhymed description of "base-ball"
and a woodcut that shows a field set-up somewhat similar to the modern
game—though in a triangular rather than diamond
configuration, and with posts instead of ground-level bases.[5] English
lawyer William Bray recorded a game of baseball
on Easter Monday 1755 in Guildford, Surrey; Bray's diary was verified
as authentic in September 2008.[6] This early
form of the game was apparently brought to North America by English immigrants;
rounders was also brought to the continent
by both British and Irish immigrants. The first known American reference
to baseball
appears in a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts,
town bylaw prohibiting the playing of the game near the town's new meeting
house.
By 1796, a version of the game was well-known
enough to earn a mention in a German scholar's book on popular pastimes.
As described by Johann Gutsmuths, "englische
Base-ball" involved a contest between two teams, in which "the batter has
three attempts to hit the ball while at the
home plate"; only one out was required to retire a side.[
By the early 1830s...
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