Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
September 12, 2008
Baseball in England

Lewis Maskell sends this link to a story of a British diarist mentioning baseball in the 1700s. I wish the diarist, William Bray, described the game in more detail. It would be fun to know how many bases were used, if they called balls and strikes, if they used terms like single and home run.


Posted by David Pinto at 09:08 AM | History | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Probably rounders or something close. As the story notes, Jane Austen also mentioned baseball in the 1700s, which again was probably some variant of rounders.

Nobody knows exactly how the bat and ball games evolved. There's a huge pile of speculation on the web, but exact rules descriptions are lacking until the 19th century...possibly because there weren't any really hard and fast rules.

Once you get the idea to create more than two safe stations and only play with one batsman at a time, you're moving from cricket to rounders and its descendant, baseball. But nobody really knows how the early evolution occurred.

As the BBC story notes, this isn't Dr. Naismith and his peach basket.

Posted by: Casey Abell at September 12, 2008 09:58 AM

I think the main discovery here was that people were playing a game called "baseball" in England in 1755. Whether we can call it baseball as we know it today is very difficult to decipher. As Casey states, it was probably a form of rounders.

The fiction book "Little Pretty Pocket Book", published in 1744, has a page on base-ball and the engraving depicts a game using posts (i.e. more like rounders) and the 'batter' is using his bare palm to hit the ball. The four lines 'describing' the game state:

The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy,
To the next destined Post,
And then Home with Joy.

So they possibly used the term 'home' to denote the final post where you score a run (if they did indeed score 'runs' in the game).

Posted by: Matt Smith at September 12, 2008 10:55 AM

Also, which position did Julio Franco play?

Posted by: Tuffy at September 12, 2008 10:56 AM
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