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Batting, Running, and ‘Burning’ in Early Modern Europe: a Contribution to the Debate on the Roots of Baseball

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Batting, Running, and ‘Burning’ in Early Modern Europe: a Contribution to the Debate on the Roots of Baseball The International Journal of the History of Sport ISSN: 0952-3367 (Print) 1743-9035 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fhsp20 Batting, Running, and ‘Burning’ in Early Modern Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on the Roots of Baseball Isak Lidström & Daniel Bjärsholm To cite this article: Isak Lidström & Daniel Bjärsholm (2019) Batting, Running, and ‘Burning’ in Early Modern Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on the Roots of Baseball, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 36:17-18, 1612-1624, DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2020.1714597 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2020.1714597 © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 05 Feb 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 438 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fhsp20 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT 2019, VOL. 36, NOS. 17–18, 1612–1624 https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2020.1714597 Batting, Running, and ‘Burning’ in Early Modern Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on the Roots of Baseball Isak Lidstrom€ a and Daniel Bj€arsholma,b aDepartment of Sport Science, Malmo€ University, Malmo,€ Sweden; bDepartment of Sport Science, Linnaeus University, V€axj€o, Sweden ABSTRACT KEYWORDS A common topic of discussion among baseball historians is the Baseball history; bat-and- question whether baseball is the ancestor of rounders or not. In ball games; history of ball order to shed new light on this debate, historians need to expand games; baserunning games; rounders the limited knowledge about the old bat-and-ball games of Continental Europe in order to develop a more cogent consideration of the origins of baseball. Traditional European bat-and-ball games, known by names such as ‘longball’, schlagball, meta, palant or lapta, have been overlooked in previous studies on the roots of baseball. Bycomparingvariantsofthisgameandbaseball,asdescribedby Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths in the late eighteenth cen- tury, resemblances and connections between English bat-and-ball games and counterparts in Continental Europe are highlighted. ‘It is a popular belief that modern sports and games originated in England’,sports historian Heiner Gillmeister once stated.1 An illustrative example of this statement is found when studying the historiography of pre-modern baseball. In the late 1930s, Robert W. Henderson refuted with source-critical precision the myth that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball in the USA a decade earlier. Instead, Henderson argued that the national pastime of America derived from the English game of rounders.2 In 2005, the history was rewritten once again when David Block published his comprehensive masterpiece Baseball before We Knew It. With additional empirical evidence, Block’s conclusion was a modification of Henderson’s claim: Baseball did not derive from rounders, but the origin of rounders was baseball!3 As a synthesis of the long-standing discussion, Richard Hershberger stated in 2009 that attempts to place the games in a chronological order are misleading, as pre-modern baseball and pre-modern rounders of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, were nothing more than two different labels for one uncodified game with locally varied rules.4 The discussion of whether rounders preceded baseball or not has been much debated. However, very little attention has been paid to the old games that flourished outside the British Isles that share some features with baseball and rounders.5 There CONTACT Isak Lidstrom€ [email protected] Department of Sport Science, Malmo€ University, Malmo€ 205 06, Sweden ß 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT 1613 has been a tendency for previous research to focus unilaterally on old English games in the search for the predecessors of baseball. Two of these games are Tut-ball and Stool-ball. With their ancient roots in England, they are, according to David Block, the most prominent games from which baseball has evolved.6 That baseball has its origin in England is a common scholarly assertion. Considering the insular location of the British Isles, the game has been able to develop and adopt new forms in isolation, relatively free from external European influences. However, a European outlook on other bat-and-ball games of the early modern period complicates the picture of how the earliest versions of baseball evolved. Europeans during this period played a specific bat-and-ball game under a multitude of names, such as schlagball, meta, palant or lapta. In the Scandinavian countries it has been called ‘longball’ (Danish: langbold;Swedish:långboll). Since there is no uniform name of the game, it is hereafter called ‘the two-base bat-and-ball game’, which summarizes the main characteristics of the pastime. By comparing old versions of this game with pre- modern baseball, a couple of similarities between the games emerge, indicating that they are closely related to each other. This relationship illuminates how baseball’s roots stretch beyond North America and the British Isles as well. Most of the empirical data originates from the Scandinavian countries, Sweden in particular. This data offers new perspectives on findings of previous international historical studies on bat-and-ball games that have sought to unravel the mysteries surrounding the origins of baseball.7 The Swedish version of the two-base bat-and-ball game långboll is today almost extinct, but in the late nineteenth century it was probably the best-known game involving bat and ball.8 Although there were many variants, the game usually started with dividing the participants into two teams. Thereafter, an interesting ritual was performed in order to determine which team should start batting. First, one of the team captains threw the bat to the other team captain, who caught it with one hand. After that, the two captains alternately placed their hand above the opponent’s until the top of the bat was reached. If those who reached the top of the bat managed to swing it around their head three times without losing it, the competition was over and their team started at the batting position.9 The following description summarizes the elementary rules of the two-base bat-and- ball game, as it has been played historically: The playing field had the shape of a rectangle, approximately 30–50 m long, in which the short sides marked the borders that distinguished two bases – the home base and the running base – from the fielding area. Two teams positioned themselves at the bases, the batting team at the home base and the fielding team at the running base. The aim of the fielding team was to win the position of the batting team, while the aim of the batting team was to defend its position at the home base. The game started when a pitcher of the fielding team, standing in the home base, tossed the ball to a batter of the batting team who, after a successful hit, started running from the home base to the running base. If someone from the fielding team managed to catch the ball before it touched the ground, the teams switched bases. At both bases, the batters and their team members were considered safe, but as soon as they ran on the field between the two bases, they risked being tagged or ‘burned’, which happened when they were hit by the ball thrown by any member of the fielding team. As soon as this happened, the teams switched sides.10 1614 I. LIDSTRÖM AND D. BJÄRSHOLM These are the general rules of lapta, schlagball, palant, longball or any other variant of the two-base bat-and-ball game.11 In general, the characteristic feature is a struggle for the position as batting team. Additionally, the names of the teams often symbolized a social hierarchy, as in Estonia, where the team at the batting position was called ‘the lords’, who tried to defend the town (the home base) from the peasants (the fielding team).12 In Germany, likewise, the two teams were called, according to Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, ‘the rulers’ and ‘the servants’.13 Although the game spread throughout large parts of Europe, people had a very limited knowledge of its spread outside their own country. Several countries or regions of Europe have claimed to be its birthplace. Viktor Balck, a pioneer of the Swedish sports movement, argued in 1885 that longball was to be considered a ‘Scandinavian ball game’.14 Even the ethnologist Johan Gotlind,€ one of the most eminent Swedish scholars of traditional games and sports, considered longball as the ‘premier and most widespread of the old ball games of the Nordic countries’.15 Long before, in the late eighteenth century, GutsMuths, the pedagogue, presented a comprehensive description under the heading ‘The German ball game’.16 The German variant has subsequently been played under the name of schlagball. In Russia, the two-base bat-and-ball game is known by the name of lapta and is considered to be very old. It is said to have been very popular as early as the reign of Peter the Great (1672–1725).17 It is also worth noting that the strong connection between bat-and-ball games and national identity became apparent in the 1950s when an emotional discussion arose after it had been claimed that baseball derived from Russian lapta, a statement which, probably and not surprisingly, was rejected from an American point of view.
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