Despite the obvious similarities, the two games are quite different.
American baseball became a national sport after the Civil War, so its been around quite some time. And, immigration from England was rather small-the English were far outnumbered by the Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, Jews, etc.
I know that there was a Congressional Committee (the Spaulding Committee) set up in the early 1900’s (to investigate the background of baseball)-what conclusions did they reach?
Fairly obvious that baseball evolved from the old English game of rounders. (rounders was also called “baseball” way back in the 18th century). The games are superficially the same and both are very different to cricket.
Pssst don’t let the poor dears learn that rounders is a girls game.
Bat and ball games go back to before the days of William the Conqueror, so in all likelihood we’re talking about games that evolved from a common ancestor and share some DNA.
Cricket, we know, dates back to the 1500s in an identifiably cricketish form, and by the late 17th century was massively popular in England, a subject of fairly enthusiastic wagering and chest-pounding, and was being played in a form similar to its current form. But it was predated by bat and ball games going back centuries.
Baseball history has been a bit polluted by the silly Abner Doubleday myth, which, ironically, placed the creation of the game way too late. The truth is that nobody knows quite for sure whether baseball derived largely from cricket, rounders, from cricket via rounders, or through old French or German sports; it does seem for certain though that the earliest references to sports that are identifiably baseball start in the early to mid 1700s. While I can’t absolutely prove it, the fact that this precisely coincides with
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Cricket becoming England’s national sport and a fairly serious enterprise for some people, and
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Cricket going through a number of really serious changes in rules and the way it was played,
… it seems rather exceedingly likely to me that the development of baseball was influenced by cricket.
Contrary to popular belief there is actually very little evidence that baseball came from rounders; the two games appear to have evolved, at least to some extent, at the same time. So they may both be the children of cricket, or they may have evolved from a European game but been influenced by cricket as they grew.
Baseball is in fact an English game in origin, so it’s probably modified cricket. Having said that, a game of baseball in the 1700s would have looked almost unrecognizable to an observer from today; you’d have seen an extremely violent sport (you got people out by throwing the ball at them) with posts instead of bases, different numbers of everything, and so on. Most of the current features of the game were created in the mid 19th century when the sport suddenly, for what reason I honestly don’t know, exploded in popularity in New York, Boston and that area; it quite literally went from being a sport of little significance to being the most popular sport in America in a span of twenty or thirty years while at the same time changing more than half of the sport’s fundamental rules.
To give you some idea of the unlikely speed and nature of this, try to imagine that in thirty years the most popular sport in American will be croquet, except instead of being played with mallets it’s played with bats and instead of making a series of shots on your ball you’re runing around dribbling the ball with your feet while your opponent tries to tackle you, and every school and town in America has a team playing it. Why the baseball craze took hold I have never seen adequately explained.
The Mills Commission was the group that declared that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in the first decade of the 20th century. It was the result of a long-running debate between Albert Spalding who favored an American-only origin for baseball and Henry Chadwick who favored the British rounders origin. Doubleday had as much to do with baseball as Washington had to do with chopping down a cherry tree but the Mills Commission declared Doubleday the inventor and it was a few decades before the Doubleday story was fully discredited.
I have a hard time seeing rounders/baseball as a derivative of cricket. The differences just seem too fundamental.
The bowling method, bat style, pitch layout, team size seem to me to suggest a different origin. I suspect a much earlier split from a prototypical bat and ball game into cricket on the one hand and rounders/baseball (they pretty much are the same thing) on the other.
Soccer and American football are both derivatives of rugby, and I’d say that’s an even more bizarre origin story.
Soccer is not derived from Rugby. The other way around would be closer to the truth, although it is probably more accurate to say that they are both derived form traditional English football, which had rules that varied from place to place.
There is a good book that came out last year about the origins of baseball and the evolution to the league system that we know today. It’s Baseball in the Garden of Eden by John Thorn. Worth a read.
As has already been pointed out, you have it the wrong way round but when stated correctly it highlights my point.
Rugby, American football and soccer all stem from a common ancestor. An early split formed two branches, one was to be Association football, the other was to be Rugby and then american football. The latter two sharing far more similarities to each other than either do to soccer and both growing in isolation from their bigger brother.
Similarly I don’t see any real influence on rounders/baseball by cricket. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise but they seem different beasts entirely and I can’t see a logical developmental thread. If anything it seems far more likely that some simplified form of rounders came first, which branched into cricket and then itself evolved into the games of rounders/baseball/softball which we know today.
The reason I say rounders first is because cricket is more elaborate in rules and equipment but the concept of “take bat, hit ball, score a run” underlies all of them and lends itself to rudimentary equipment.
You don’t see a logical development from hitting a ball with a bat and going between two safe places, and hitting a ball with a bat and going to more than two safe places?
That’s certainly possible, but it’s unquestionably the case that there is historical evidence for cricket existing before rounders, and rounders appears in writing long after cricket became very popular.
Sports do not necessarily evolve into more complex sports - the various forms of softball, for instance, are obviously created from baseball, but are no more complicated and in some cases are less complicated. The path from sport to sport is not often an obvious one; I don’t think a lot of people know volleyball was created as a less athletic form of basketball.
My point is that, regardless of what the game is called, I see the development from a recognisable “cricket” game to rounders/baseball as more unlikely than parallel development of both from a more basic precursor.
Were we to roll back the years to that common precursor I suspect we would see it as closer to rounders than cricket.