Baseball Before We Knew It

"Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game" is a 2005 book by David Block. The book is about the history of baseball and the writer of the book, David Block, brings fresh new evidence of the origins of baseball into play. Block looks into the early history of baseball and of the debate about its beginnings. [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/books/review/10LAMSTER.html 'Baseball Before We Knew It': What's the French for 'Juiced'?] ]

The story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 was once widely promoted and widely believed. However, this belief was discredited almost as soon as it was first made public in 1908. Although the Doubleday myth was never taken seriously by historians, Block showed that the gospel that supplanted it was also deeply flawed. In this accounting, baseball was understood as the derivation of an English children's game, rounders, but America was allowed to retain patrimony over its national pastime through the assertion that it had been reinvented as a modern sport by the members of the New York Knickerbockers, who codified its rules for the first time in 1845. This idea, in almost every aspect, is wrong. In the book, Block convincingly argues that baseball was not a product of rounders, and its essential form had already been established by the late 18th century.

In the book, Block brings fresh new evidence of the origins of baseball into play. The first known record of the term "base-ball" in the United States came in a 1791 ordinance in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that banned ballplaying near the town's new meetinghouse. However, that was not the first appearance of "base-ball" in print. That distinction belongs to an English book, "A Little Pretty Pocket-Book" (1744). By 1796 the rules of this English game were well enough established for Johann Gutsmuths, a scholar in Schnepfenthal, Germany, to describe them in his "englische Base-ball", a book about popular games and sports. This book also predates the rules laid out by the New York Knickerbockers by nearly fifty years. In the book, Block suggests that it was the English game of baseball that had arrived in the U.S. as part of "a sweeping tide of cultural migration" during the colonial period. Once on American soil, the game developed popular regional variations that included "town-ball", "round-ball" and the "New York game".

English baseball was itself the product of a prolonged, nonlinear evolution. "Tut-ball" may have been its immediate predecessor. "Stool-ball", an earlier sport, may have been even more influential in the evolution of baseball, and is also a likely parent of cricket, which developed independently. Medieval texts also suggest that baseball's English antecedents may themselves have descended from Continental bat-and-ball games. An illustration in the French manuscript "The Romance of Alexander" (1344) depicts a group of monks and nuns engaged in a game, thought to be "la soule", that looks much like co-ed softball. Two other French games, "théque" and "la balle empoisonée" ("poisoned ball"), also bear similarities to early baseball. They could have migrated to England. In Block's words, the field is clear for the French to claim "parental rights over America's National Game."

Block also presents other interesting facts about the origins of baseball. In the book, Block also noted that American researchers during the past half-century "have made only minimal effort to document baseball's early history and for the most part have not been inclined to go looking to European sources for clues."

The book received the 2006 Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Block received the medal at the Eighth Annual Seymour Conference. [ [http://www.sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,1598,40,0 "Baseball Before We Knew It" by David Block to receive the Seymour Medal] ]

Notes

Bibliography

*Block, David. "Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game". University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0803213395.

External links

* [http://www.baseballbeforeweknewit.com/ Baseball Before We Knew It]