JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum "British" Baseball FIRST?! (To maybe write about)

No wonder I always loved the game!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/ot...-was-invented-in-Surrey-not-America.html

Could be just a form of a Cricket game, but either way, this story could be turned into a song for anyone who gets inspired. I don't know if the above source if reliable though, but fiction or not, it could be a funny song waiting to be written.

Go for the fence!

"Cake Batter Up"!

John

We have a game in the UK called Rounders it is played in schools and parks and very much a family game, the rules are similar to ‘Baseball’ except the bat is not as big (so the ball doesn't go so far). Who knows when these various games were first played or what they were called? I expect as soon as some found a stick and a stone there were the beginnings of a game.

Hi John This is not news just history. We have always known that baseball is just a variation of the British kids game of rounders. American football is a crude variation of rugby and pool is a variation of billiards and snooker. Basketball and hockey are a variation of ancient games played by the Native American Indians. Golf was invented in Scotland.
Maybe eventually USA will actually invent its own sports. LOL

Interesting! He actually used the word baseball!

I wonder if he actually described the game itself. Baseball could mean anything.......

Yes Jim, American Football is Rugby without the glitter.

Cool stuff!

Scott

Hey Scott rugby does not need the glitter or the crash helmets and padding. It is played by REAL men, not overpaid WIMPS who have to stop every few seconds for a breather. Unlike American football they are capable of multi tasking and only need one team who are on the field all game. ha ha ha!

Also wandering off from the baseball story here, I remember reading that the actual time of NFL football plays for each team on offense is on average only a total of 8 minutes per game. (16 for both team's total time of actual playing). Guess with all the gear they wear, they need the other 2 hours and 52 minutes to catch their breath! And, to think about each play, like in Chess. It's chess with beatings! Ha!

OK,,,getting back to Rounders and Baseball:

Is Cricket the same as Rounders, for which I saw played as a kid in England in 1959? I was told that the game I was watching was Cricket. White clothes for both teams, and the pitcher would bounce the ball and try to get it through the wickets, (I think they are called). The game lasted all day, and still wasn't decided. ???? Did they like the premise of the 100 year war so much that they wanted their games to last as long?!

Thanks,
John

They did! But the players are all gone now. It was called Yorktown.

Ouch

Lol! Burn!

Hey Jim, you don't have to convince me about Rugby - geez, half those guys are missing their teeth. Tough guys, indeed...

Scott

Rounders is very similar to baseball, both have diamonds and bases and a ‘home run’ is similar to a ‘rounder’. Cricket is a completely different game which is what you saw in 1959. There are many forms of cricket, and the type you are talking about would have probably been either ‘test’ or ‘county’. In the ‘test’ form it is possible to play for 5 days and it still end up a draw. It is quite a tactical game as well as the skill factor, but in simple terms one team scores a total of ‘runs’ and the other team has to try and beat it.

What about basketball? Didn’t you guys invent that?

There is only one thing more boring than playing cricket and that is watching it.

I don't know much of anything about cricket or rounders, but I do enjoy watching Scottish Football on the international sports channel. I have no idea what any of the rules are, but it looks like fun.

As far as the "American" sports, I long ago quit watching baseball, basketball, or football. The results are all predetermined and the games are phony. There is only one true, pure sport that isn't fixed. Of course, I am talking about Professional Wrestling!

Found this, to add to any song in the making.

History

Rounders is, almost unquestionably, baseball's immediate ancestor. Primarily a boys' sport in England, it was mentioned, along with baseball, in a 1744 publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, and the sport was explained in detail in the second edition of The Boy's Own Book, published in 1828.

It's quite likely that both rounders and cricket evolved from stoolball, though there's no direct evidence that they did.

Henry Chadwick, a native of England who became the first newspaper writer to cover baseball, wrote a historical piece for Spalding's Baseball Guide in 1903, in which he asserted that baseball had derive from rounders. The assertion angered his publisher, A. G. Spalding, who insisted that baseball must be a thoroughly American sport.

Spalding called for a commission to investigate the origins of "the great American pastime," and it was this commission that decided in 1907 that Abner Doubleday had invented the sport. So Chadwick's undoubtedly true statement ironically led to the creation of a total myth.

Incidentally, Spalding should have known better. He was among a group of baseball players who visited England in 1874, when English spectators and sportswriters all recognized the "American" sport as a variation on rounders. And in 1889 Spalding was on an American team that played a game against a champion English rounders team in Liverpool.

The Scottish Rounders Association was founded in 1889 and a National Rounders Association was established in England in 1943. However, rounders remains primarily a sport for schoolboys and schoolgirls.

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The Game

There are four posts in rounders, but the field is laid out as a pentagon with one open side. The batsman stands at a batting square, 28 feet from the front of the bowling square.

The bowler is supposed to throw the ball over the batting square, above the knee and below the head of the batsman. If he does, the batsman is supposed to try to hit the ball.

Even if he doesn't swing at a legal pich, or if he swings and misses, the batsman has to run to the first post. As in baseball, he then tries to proceed to the second, third, and fourth posts. However, the fourth post is not where he started out. It's 28 feet to the left of the batting square.

There's no such as foul territory in rounders. If the batted ball goes behind the batting square, the batsman can run only as far as first post until the ball is thrown back into the forward area.

A runner is put out if his batted ball is caught in the fly, if a fielder touches him with the ball between posts, or if the post toward which he's running is touched with the ball by a fielder. Three bad pitches entitle the batsman to move to the second post; that's called "half a rounder," and circling the posts is a "rounder," which scores one point.

There are nine players on a team and nine outs in an inning. Two innings make up a match.

Stoolball?

Stoolball??!!?

That hardly sounds like fun!

Though I suppose it would be easy to get another ball if you lost one......

Interesting article, John - thanks for posting it.

Scott

I read it as softball on my read through! BUTT, stoolball does take on another aspect of that game! Wow! Butter up!