It's a bit like inventing the tyre and claiming to have invented the wheel.There was an element of development but very firmly based on rounders.I'm sure that when kids play an impromptu game of baseball they don't stick to 9 players a side or 90 feet between bases but they still think of it as being baseball.Rounders was never really formalised as such. But this is the point-anyone who played rounders as a kid will recognise baseball as being essentially the same game.The difference is in the detail.
All games have been revised and revamped from time to time; the number of players per side in soccer and cricket wasn't originally defined and neither was the size of the pitch.Modern cricket is as different from 1800 cricket as baseball is from rounders , the same is true of soccer but it's a matter of evolution rather than invention.
Just like anyone who plays baseball as a kid will recognize softball as essentially the same game? Just like anyone who plays football as a kid will recognize rugby as essentially the same game? Just like anyone who plays badminton as a kid will recognize volleyball as essentially the same game?
Similar? Yes. The same game? No.
You even said yourself that...
The difference is in the detail.
Baseball isn't Cricket. Baseball isn't Town Ball. Baseball isn't Rounders. They're
all different.
I'm pretty sure that people have been kicking a ball around or hitting a ball with a stick for millennia.Football was once banned in England because it was interfering with archery practice!
It's true that many sports seem to have originated in these islands but this might be because our social structure allowed us to develop them.I have just been looking at a 1796 article on English baseball written by a German and it's pretty clear that there was a German version of the game too!
However, the bulk of early settlers in America were from England and for a long while regarded themselves as English with a different address. Clearly they would have taken with them their customs and leisure pursuits and these would have included games.The rest is history.
You're right! People
have been hitting a ball with a stick for millennia. When I did my research a few years back, the earliest documentation of "stick and ball" games that I found, was back in the times of Ancient Egypt. The time period of Ancient Egypt goes from 3100 B.C to 395 A.D., which is
eons before England even existed.
If you're going to talk about "roots" of baseball, then you
can't be serious when you claim that the English invented it. If you're going to use "roots" of the game as part of the formula, then England was waaaaaaay behind the times when they started making "stick and ball" games. Ancient Egyptians used "stick and ball" games as part of their religious practice, to represent the struggle between good and evil.
