Everyone knows baseball was invented here in America, right? Not so fast...
General question: How would you determine the first baseball game? If a sport called "Base Ball" were mentioned in a diary yet played like rugby, would this count? At what degree of similarity do you draw the line? Name only? Name and same objective yet vastly different rules? I, nor anyone else, has the answer...so this debate isn't likely to get settled any time soon.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
For my money the best source to consult is David Block's book, Baseball Before We Knew It.
http://www.baseballbeforeweknewit.com/
Oh, as far as your question goes, there simply is no "first game". The game evolved. It's like asking who was the "first" human being.
But the first recorded game between two well organized teams is generally regarded to have been the match between the Knickerbockers (the team that first codified the rules a year earlier) and a group called the "New York Nine" on July 19, 1846.
But they were playing a game that you and I would recognize as a close cousin to base ball for many generations before this.
Versions of this are still being played today as "vintage base ball". http://www.vbba.org
I could have sworn that baseball was invented at the Menlo School, on a dusty (i.e., beautifully manicured) field behind Jerry Rice's house, with a group of privileged, white suburbanites led by a scrawny, scrappy, slap-hitting southpaw named Matty and a garbage collector who thought it was a waste of time to study...but that's just me.
Post a Comment