You are here:
Home 
Committee Info Annual Reports 2005 Origins Committee Annual Report
Committee Info Annual Reports 2005 Origins Committee Annual Report
| 2005 Origins Committee Annual Report |
| Written by Patrick Carroll |
| Saturday, 31 December 2005 00:00 |
|
The SABR Origins Committee rises as a rather middle-aged Phoenix from the still-warm ashes of the UK/Europe History Committee. Those who have followed the past activities of the old committee, either in the pages of the SABR/UK Examiner or through members’ contributions to other SABR publications, will be aware that a large proportion of its energies have been devoted to exploring the antecedents of baseball and its related games. In his monumental, recently published work Baseball Before We Knew It, David Block (whom we are delighted to welcome as a member of the new committee) has generously acknowledged his appreciation of the research carried out by members of the UK/Europe History Committee. The most palpable result of this research has been the final dispelling of the twin transatlantic delusions concerning the origins of baseball. On the American side, although the Doubleday tarradiddle has long been discredited, there has been a residual belief (shared by even such an astute an observer as J.M. Ward) that somehow the game sprang, ex nihilo, “full growed” like Topsy from the native genius of the American Boy. On the British side there is the parrot cry of “Oh, you mean rounders”, which holds that baseball is a direct development of “the ancient English game of rounders”. The problem with this theory – put forward by (again, knowledgeable) figures such as Henry Chadwick and Robert Henderson – is that no one has ever been able to deduce any historical evidence whatsoever that there is such a thing as a single “ancient English” game of rounders. To believe that one sport gives birth to another in a direct lineal fashion is to fundamentally misunderstand how games develop. What recent research has underlined is that we are dealing with a family of bat, ball and running games, with numerous names and a multitude of regional and localized variations. There seems to have been a primordial human instinct that leads a child, when presented with a spherical object that can’t be eaten, to either kick it, throw it or hit it with a stick. And those versions of the basic formula of striking a ball with a bat and running between fixed points that have evolved to the status of being thought suitable to played by the most highly skilled professional athletes – notably baseball and cricket – are those which have best adapted themselves to their physical, social and, indeed, political environments. In short, we take a basically Darwinian, rather than a creationist, view of baseball’s origins. In this spirit of sporting anthropology we hope to continue exploring the history and nature of these various members of the bat, ball and running game family, which has ancestors and children everywhere in the world. In conclusion, we should say that the research that members have carried out into the more modern history of baseball in Britain, Ireland and Europe will continue under the auspices of the Bobby Thomson Chapter. Patrick Carroll, Chair, Origins Committee |
| Last Updated on Thursday, 19 March 2009 14:18 |