There is very little known about the origins of baseball. There appears
to be a historic mish-mash of very early games that may very well have
ties to modern baseball. The idea that baseball evolved from any of these
sources turns out to be conjecture or theory. Like most history, if it
goes back far enough, details start to get quite fuzzy. By its very
nature, baseball has been a game that has thrived on legends and myth.
There is evidence that baseball is strictly American, as many of its
features are unique. Conversely, many cling to the long held belief
that baseball was derived from rounders, a British game. This claim is
somewhat hard to dispute. Almost everything except the shape of the
field is similar to baseball.
Rounders uses posts instead of bases, and there are four posts, but the
field is arranged in a pentagon, with one side open. There is no foul
territory, and if a batsman swings at a pitch, or if the pitch is deemed
inside the "batting square" and there is no swing, they must attempt to
run to the first post, even if they don't make contact with the ball.
A fielder
produces an out by tagging the runner with the ball, tagging the
post the batsman is running toward with the ball, or catching the
hit ball on the fly. A batsman advances to the first post if three
pitches are delivered by the "bowler," 28 feet away, outside of the
batting square. A batsman can also advance on a ball hit behind the
field arrangement, an area that is considered "foul territory" in
baseball, but only to the first post. There are nine players to a
team, just like in baseball, but there are nine outs per inning, and
two innings comprise a complete game.
There is no evidence of a direct connection of baseball to rounders
other than early sports writers (mostly British) saying so. Still,
others believe that baseball was developed from a very old folk game
known as stool ball (1085 A.D., also British). This is a stretch, as the
game has many dissimilar features. We know that in 2000 B.C. ball and
stick type games were played by ancient cultures, and Egyptian
hieroglyphics describe an ancient game similar to baseball in 1500 B.C.
Baseball historians have tried to connect everything from these ancient
games to "tip-cat" to "base" as a claim to baseball's ancestry. Many
theorists from England claim that baseball was taken from rounders,
which has many similarities, but it also has features dissimilar to
baseball. Most of these theories are questionable at best and downright
ridiculous at worst.
In tip-cat a "batter" strikes the end of a whittled "cat," a piece of
wood about 4 inches long that is similar to a parallelogram or pyramid
on each end. It is struck with a long stick which also serves as the
bat. The "cat" is catapulted into the air, then struck on its down
flight with the bat. A player gets three "strikes" at the cat, and the
greatest accumulated distance wins. Does this sound anything like
baseball?
The game of base is just more-or-less "tag" with a base where you are
safe. The "base" is the only similarity to the game of baseball. Many of
the earlier folk games that go back as far as the 1300¡¯s in England had
some similarities to baseball, cricket, rounders and other games. These
games went by various names, including stob-ball, stow-ball, stoolball,
poison ball, tip-cat, and the list goes on to infinity. Many baseball
historians have stated these early games were more direct ancestors of
cricket and rounders.
Stoolball, most notably, had many similar features to rounders and
cricket. In stoolball, a batter defended an object (a stool or a stump)
by striking a pitched projectile of some sort. If the batter hit the
projectile and it was caught by a fielder, or missed hitting the ball
and it struck a stool leg or a stump, the batter was out. There is also
some evidence, although not clearly, that these types of games were
social games and also had some similarities to "spin-the-bottle".
Stob-ball and stow-ball were regional spin-off games similar to
stoolball. In the year 1700, Thomas Wilson wrote down his disapproval of
"morris dancing, cudgel-playing, baseball and cricket." Some sources
claim this statement was "stoolball" rather than baseball.
In 1744, a small book by John Newbery called A Little Pretty Pocket-Book
provides us a woodcut model of the field in stoolball. It includes a
rhyme that mentions base-ball. The book was later republished in
Colonial America. It was also documented that in 1748 Frederick, the
Prince of Wales, played in a game similar to baseball. There were many
other early British and Colonial American games that have been thrown
into the controversial "chicken or the egg" argument of baseball's
origin. Perhaps rounders came from stoolball, or perhaps baseball came
from rounders? Some have even recently suggested that rounders and
cricket came from baseball.
Really, all that we do know for a fact is that the terms base-ball and
stoolball were used interchangeably on many occasions. We know for sure
that the first written rules for modern baseball appeared in 1845. We
also know that one of the reasons they were written was, once again, the
rules were changed.
These "original" rules laid out the foul lines and eliminated the "plug
out" (hitting the runner with the ball to gain an out, if not on a
base). This document also included the first account of the tag-out and
the force-out. There were also no "innings" in the Knickerbocker or New
York game. The first team to reach twenty-one, allowing equal number of
at-bats, won the game. Cartwright may have written the modern rules, but
there are still differences from the modern game.
What's important
is that for the first time in baseball history these changes were
clearly documented, as were subsequent adjustments to the modern rules
of baseball. The evolution of baseball is a long and complex path, which
has snaked its way through a large number of similar games.
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