1839 Olympics item in REA

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Posted By: barrysloate

Rob- that was a long post! But John Thorn is an excellent writer and it was well worth reading.

What historians of the game have learned, and I have been saying this for years, is nobody invented baseball. Bat and ball games have been played for centuries, and if you follow their progression you begin to see how the rules, and even the name of the game, evolved over time; and how each version of the game began to look more and more like the game we play today.

The first appearance of the term "baseball" in a purely American book occurred in Robin Carver's 1834 children's volume "The Book of Sports." Carver provides rudimentary rules for the game that a child could understand, but admits in his first sentence :"I think the game is called 'base' or 'goal' ball." He knew the game, but he was not absolutely sure what to call it. The townball the Olympics played certainly closely resembled baseball as we know it today; and surely the Knickerbocker rules a decade later refined the game even more, to the point where it is nearly identical to the game as it is currently played. And it has continued to fine tune itself ever since.