Baseball 'invented in Britain'
Chalk another one up for the Brits..:)
Baseball, America's treasured national sport, was first played in Britain, according to new evidence.
Local historians in Surrey have confirmed that baseball was played in the UK more than 20 years before American independence.
A diary that documents a game being played in Guildford in 1755 has been verified by Surrey History Centre.
William Bray, a Surrey diarist and historian from Shere, wrote about the game when he was still a teenager.
Julian Pooley, Surrey History Centre manager and William Bray expert, said the diary showed the game was a well-established sport in the 18th Century and was played by men and women.
Mr Pooley said: "He kept lots and lots of diaries that we have in the Surrey History Centre but last year a new one was discovered in a garden shed and it contains his diary from 1754 to 1755.
"It contains a reference to him playing baseball. What intrigued me is he is playing it with a load of young ladies."
The diary states they had tea after the game on Easter Monday and also played cricket.
Kevin Sullivan, the Washington Post's London correspondent and an avid Boston Red Sox fan, said: "It's a great American tradition to take things from other places and improve them. We've always known that baseball evolved - it wasn't invented like basketball.".
If you look at my last week's postin gs, I have stopped making fun of anyone..except the Brits..
If I remember correctly, rounders didn't appear until about 60 or 70 years after baseball. Can't recall where I read that though.
Its rounders! Surely!
My Bad, I was always told it was.....:P
"Your born, You Live, You Die, given this premise, one can conclude since we have no control over when we are born and when we die, the only thing that matters to us should be how we live, simple really?" Mis-Cat to her philosophy Lecturer.
Baseball did not originate from rounders Mis-Cat!!!
Well one things for sure. It wouldn't have been invented in Britain in the last 10 years. Health and Safety would have banned it.
and played with a shorter bat, if you've seen "The Wedding Date" there is a scene in it were they actually are playing it..
"Your born, You Live, You Die, given this premise, one can conclude since we have no control over when we are born and when we die, the only thing that matters to us should be how we live, simple really?" Mis-Cat to her philosophy Lecturer.
Probably they were just playing cricket without reading up the rules book.
"It contains a reference to him playing baseball. What intrigued me is he is playing it with a load of young ladies."
Or, prolly just bending the rules a bit for the "young ladies" who weren't accustomed to playing a "Gentleman's Game".
so it's a ladies sport?
Had to be Britexpat :)
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According to Stephen Fry;
Baseball was first named and described in 1774 in A Little Pretty Pocket Book, a very popular English book which was reprinted in America in 1762.
In 1907 the American baseball authorities advanced a story that the game was invented by the Civil War general Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. Abner Doubleday never visited Cooperstown and never mentioned baseball in his diaries.
"Everything in this book may be wrong." Illusions: The Adventures of The Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach