Difference between revisions of "Baseball"

Revision as of 00:00, July 6, 2007

A baseball game at Busch Memorial Stadium, St. Louis, Missouri.

Baseball, known as rounders in England where it originated, is a game consisting of nine active players on each team (except for those teams having designated hitters) who take turns playing defense on the field and batting one at a time. The object is for the batters to hit a ball thrown by the pitcher into "fair" territory such that it is not caught in the air and gives the batter time to run to a base. The offense strives to advance these baserunners until they circle the three infield bases in order and get to the fourth base, called "home". This results in the scoring of a run. Failing to reach a base during their batting attempt results in an out, and the offense is only allowed three outs before they must take the field once again. Each team is allowed nine of these "innings" during the course of the game, an exception being that a team does not bat a ninth time if they are winning after the other teams ninth attempt. If the game is tied after nine innings, additional innings are played until there is a winner.

History

A well-publicized tradition holds that the game was invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. But not even the National Baseball Hall of Fame, founded on the strength of that tradition, seriously promotes this theory any more:

After the [1905] Commission [appointed to determine the game's origins] reported its findings in 1908, many of the game's historians disputed Graves' accounts, noting that many of the innovations he attributed to Doubleday were already being practiced earlier in the 1830s. The discovery in 1999 of the original Mills Commission papers, long reported to have been burned, supports the view of many researchers that Baseball developed from, and along with, other bat-and-ball games earlier in the nineteenth century.^[1]

The word "baseball" is mentioned in passing in Jane Austen's 1803 British novel Northanger Abbey, set in England:

it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books...^[2]

but there is nothing in the context that tells any details of the game.

"Base-ball" or "base ball" was being played, under that name, during the Civil War:

Captain Kimberly was an experienced and skillful player and base ball player and took the lead in inaugurating a series of games of base ball.^[3]

The air seemed full of heavy shot, and as the flew they could be seen as plainly as a base-ball in one of our games.^[4]

A 1902 book about Philadelphia says that "base-ball" was simply a new name for an older game:

During the Civil War there was an interesting athletic development when the old game of "town-ball" was rechristened "base-ball." It is believed that the first town-ball club, called the Olympic, was established in 1833.^[5]

In 2004, a baseball historian made national news with the apparent discovery of 1791 bylaw of the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, stating that

for the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House... no Person or Inhabitant of said town, shall be permitted to play at any game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Football, Cat, Fives or any other game or games with balls, within the Distance of Eighty Yards from said Meeting House.^[6]

The Abner-Doubleday-in-Cooperstown tradition was a reaction to famous baseball writer Henry Chadwick, who had stated that the game evolved from the British game of "rounders."^[1]. In response, Albert G. Spaulding, another baseball pioneer, urged the formation of a commission to determine the game's origin; one was formed, and in due course issued a report on December 30, 1907 stating "the first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1839." The results of the Spaulding committee led to the 1939 founding of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in the city of Cooperstown.^[7]

Miscellaneous

The baseball as we know it—or at least the familiar "figure-eight" stitched cover—was invented in the 1840s by Ellis Drake of Stoughton, Massachusetts.^[8]

The umpire's hand signals for "strike" and "out" were invented by deaf baseball player William "Dummy" Hoy (1861-1961)^[9]

Notes and references

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} The Origins of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
2. ↑ Austen, Jane (1803) [Northanger Abbey http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext94/nabby11h.htm], Chapter 1
3. ↑ Nash, Eugene Arus (1910) A History of the Forty-fourth Regiment, New York Volunteer Infantry, in the Civil War, 1861-1865, p. 166
4. ↑ Johnson, Robert Underwood and Clarence Clough Buel (1888), Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Volume IV, p. 37
5. ↑ Edmond, Franklin Spencer, History of the Central High School of Philadelphia p. 251
6. ↑ Pittsfield is "Baseball's Garden of Eden"
7. ↑ The National Baseball Hall of Fame was inspired by the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in New York. Established in 1901, with a 600-foot colonnade ultimately containing bronze busts of 98 great Americans, the Hall of Fame was at one time a major landmark, and the additions of honorees to it was a national news event. Ironically, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans has itself passed into obscurity; today, the phrase "Hall of Fame" has practically come to mean the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
8. ↑ Nineteenth-century baseballs
9. ↑ Deaf Place Names