A Brief Look Into The History Of Baseball
Baseball is an extremely traditional sport. It holds a lot of history that contributes to its growth and influence in America and around the world. The game remains a firm favourite to this day, and its origins provide fascinating insight into why.
Overview
Baseball is played with a wooden bat, a ball, and leather gloves. There are two teams of nine players each on the pitch -or field- with four white bases in a diamond shape – hence the term baseball diamond.
Teams alternate positions as batters or offense and fielders or defense. They exchange places when three members of the offense are “put out.” In the position of batters, players aim to hit the ball out the reach of the fielding team. Their ultimate goal is to make a complete circuit around the bases for a home run. The team scoring the most runs in nine innings (innings are the times at bat) are the winners.
The Origins Of The Game
There are multiple stories about the invention of Baseball and it was believed for a long time that the sport was invented by a wealthy American man named Abner Doubleday, who actually served as a Union major general in the American Civil War and later became a lawyer and writer, so we can assume he did not have a lot to do with the sport itself and there are enough articles out there that shed light on Doubleday’s contribution to the sport but not the creation…
As it turns out, the real history of baseball is a little more complicated than the Doubleday myth. There are games resembling baseball that date as far back as the 18th century. Its most believable ancestors are two English games: “Rounders” (a children’s game brought to New England by the earliest colonists) and Cricket.
This is where we look into Alexander Cartwright who is known as the Father of Baseball, often noted as a major contributor to the origins of modern American baseball, Alexander Cartwright was an influential member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York City which began in 1845 and during its inception, Alexander Cartwright formalized a list of rules by which all people could play. Much of that original sporting code is still in place to this very day. This surely challenges the stories of Doubleday!
An All-American Hit
It was a nationalistic sentiment that helped to make baseball “America’s game.” In the quest to obtain greater cultural autonomy, Americans wanted a sport they could claim their own. At the time, the English had the game of cricket and Germany was famed for its gymnastic clubs. In 1857 a newspaper hinted that Americans should have a game that could be their own “native” sport – and the seeds of baseball as exactly that were sown.
Over time we have seen derivatives of this sport manifest throughout the world. Although each country might have slightly different ways of playing the game, it all stems from the original principles. As sport is modernized with the advancement in technology, just like how online casinos and Grand Rush Casino no deposit bonus offers have changed, it will be interesting to see such an old sport move and shake with the advancement of the times.
