Excerpts from Time and Game: The History of Australian Baseball
By Joe Clark 

About the Author: Joe Clark has taught in Sydney, Australia, private schools since 1981. He plays baseball for the Baulkham Hills Club in Sydney

Where did it come from?

American baseball evolved out of various ball and stick games that had been played around a long time, especially cricket and rounders.

In early America, versions of baseball included informal English games such as paddle ball, trap ball, one old cat, rounders, and town ball. Town ball was a peculiarly American game played in colonial New England by adults and children with a bat and ball on an open field.

Robin Carver’s Book of Sports in 1834 related that an American version of rounders called “base” or “goal ball” was rivalling cricket in popularity among Americans. Whatever the exact form and nature of these early games of ‘base-ball’, they undoubtedly owed a great deal to cricket and rounders. They also show that many varieties of these bat and ball games were played in various parts of America. Despite Spalding’s efforts to Americanise the origins of baseball, the link between baseball and British rounders was proved in 1939 by Robert W. Henderson, a librarian. His study of early game books for children demonstrated that the early rules for rounders and baseball were the same. The rules for rounders were found printed in The Boy’s Own Book, a collection of children’s games written by William Clarke and published in London in 1829. It was reprinted in America the same year. In 1834 a Boston publisher copied the rounders rules in a little volume called The Book of Sports by Robin Carver, but changed the heading from “Rounders to “Base, or Goal Ball” because, as Carver noted, these were “the names generally adopted in our country.” This is how English rounders became American baseball. Early baseballers made no pretences about the origins either. Rounders was the distant parent of baseball, according to the Father of Modern Baseball – Englishman Henry Chadwick in Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player of 1861, which stated,

‘This invigorating exercise and manly pastime may now be justly termed the American Game of Ball, for though of English origin, it has been so modified and improved of late years in this country as almost to deprive it of any of it’s original features beyond the mere groundwork of the game.’