The Chris Moeller Archives

The ancient origins of Base-Ball

Unbelievable stuff. Baseball’s history is being completely re-written-- that is, more expansively written-- in our lifetime by a man in San Francisco with no formal education as a historian. And when I say “baseball,” I mean “Base-Ball.”

It turns out that the game is not uniquely American at all, as Albert Goodwill Spalding, or even Henry Chadwick, had us believe. The Doubleday Fable is not the only lie. Baseball did not descend from the British game of rounders (an alternative pastural, stick-and-ball pastime that few besides Chadwick in his English youth have ever known) and it dates back to at least 1749, a year in which there is a record of the game being played by Frederick, the Prince of Wales. Frederick’s son would grow to become King George III, the tyrant from whom the American revolutionaries declared their independence in 1776. It was a game for the working class (cricket for people with less time on their hands than have the idle rich) that was suppressed for a time in the new world by Puritan objections to adults playing games. We may even discover yet, as one of the oldest artifacts allows, that the game is German in origin.

The noted evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a baseball enthusiast who died in 2002, published a book late in his life called “Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville.” One of the essays within (great Sunday reading) explains the difficulty humans have with stories of origin. Our brains can more easily comprehend a simplified and/or mythical story of birth (one containing a definitive moment of inception and therefore allowing for directed reverence) than they can a more complicated story of time-lapsed evolutionary development.

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A former New England Patriots player living in Stephentown, New York, Brian Holloway, had his house trashed by a group of local high school kids while he and his family were away on Labor Day weekend. Now the parents of some of those young, uninvited party-goers are looking to sue Holloway for publicly shaming the kids.

And you wanted to live next to rich people.

posted by CM @ 11:10 AM