The question of the origins of baseball has been the subject of debate and controversy for more than a century. Baseball and the other modern bat, ball and running games, cricket and rounders, were developed from earlier folk games in England.
Early forms of baseball had a number of names, including "Base Ball", "Goal Ball", "Round Ball", "Fletch-catch", "stool ball", and, simply, "Base". In at least one version of the game, teams pitched to themselves, runners went around the bases in the opposite direction of today's game, and players could be put out by being hit with the ball. Then as now, a batter was called out after three strikes.
Few details of how the modern game developed from earlier folk games are known. Some think that various folk games resulted in a game called town ball from which baseball was eventually born. Others believe that town ball, a game similar to rounders, played in 18th and 19th century North America, was independent from baseball.
Read more about Origins Of Baseball: Folk Games in England, Abner Doubleday Myth, Alexander Cartwright, Before 1845, Elysian Fields, After 1845
Famous quotes containing the words origins of, origins and/or baseball:
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“How, in one short century, has this ersatz sport so strangled the consciousness of the country in the grip of its flabby tentacles that the mention of women’s baseball gets no reaction other than blank amazement?”
—Darlene Mehrer, As quoted in Women in Baseball. Ch. 6, by Gai Ingham Berlage (1994)