183:" involved a contest between two teams, in which "the batter has three attempts to hit the ball while at the home plate"; only one out was required to retire a side. The 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".
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191:, 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
158:, who codified its rules for the first time in 1845. This idea, according to Block is wrong in almost every aspect. In the book, Block argues that baseball was not a product of rounders, and its essential form had already been established by the late 18th century.
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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
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Block also notes in the book 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."
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was never taken seriously by historians, Block showed that the narrative that supplanted it was also deeply flawed. In this accounting, baseball was understood as the derivation of an
English children's game,
203:("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."
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169:, 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,
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invented baseball in 1839 was once widely promoted and widely believed. However, this belief was discredited almost immediately. Although the
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Block's new evidence in the matter includes the first known record of the term
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245:"Baseball Before We Knew It" by David Block to receive the Seymour Medal
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Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game
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Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search For The Roots Of The Game
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Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game
234:'Baseball Before We Knew It': What's the French for 'Juiced'?
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Block (2005), pp. 67–75, 181; Gutsmuths quoted: p. 86.
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in the United States. It came in a 1791 ordinance in
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163:base-ball
134:from the
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114:56014560
44:Language
189:cricket
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Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Additional terms may apply.
