Roger Odisio, 13 Oct 99, 17:45
> The schoolboy game of rounders did exist first (btw, could you situate
> its creation in history for me?).
regrettably, no.
> And baseball was in some sense
> derived from it. But that derivation became transformation. First
> kinds of changes: laying out the field in a diamond rather than a
> square (home plate eventually being changed from a square to a
> five-sided figure in 1900), the new concept of foul territory, and the
> elimination of the practice in rounders of retiring a runner by throwing
> the ball *at* him. Soon followed the placement of the pitching mound,
> allowing overhand pitches, the strike zone (before that, a batter could
> ask for a pitch in a certain area), bases on balls, the idea that a ball
> must be caught on the fly to register an out automatically, the number
> of innings to be played, and on and on. You get the idea. Baseball
> became a different game than rounders, as tennis is different than
> squash.
ok. And I believe that it is quite proper that you love baseball. Note that the 20th century game of cricket is vastly different from the 18th century game of the same name. In some sense, however, 20th century cricket was derived from 18th century cricket.
> Baseball is not completely standardized. Unlike any other major
> sport I can think of, it is played on fields of different sizes and
> shapes. Just about every major league park has different dimensions
> than any other.
This is just like cricket. The 22 yards between bowler & batsmen and the construction & dimensions of the ball, bat and wickets have remained constant, but the size and shape of the field is arbitrary. I suppose that golf and curling, maybe croquet, and softball also have irregular sized grounds.
> > - you'll find that, by your definition (precise
> > universal rules), NO sports existed at the beginning of the 19th
> > century. Except perhaps tennis and bowls.
>
> Hmm. There's various forms of wrestling, running, and all kinds of
> sports now lumped together as "track and field" that include running,
> jumping and throwing (e.g., discus, javelin). Most go way back,
> wrestling and running being probably the original sports.
Yes, running and chucking stuff has been going on for a while, but the modern sport of athletics is defined by precise distances, surfaces, timing devices, and the chemical composition of competitors' blood. I imagine that the 400 metre track (with its enclosed "field"), as a standard, was first conceived of at, or shortly before, the 1896 Olympics. Now a race only counts if it is run on one. It was only recently that a sprint became defined as 100m or 200m, that a middle distance run became 1500m, 5000m or a mile, and that the cannonball used in the shotput acquired its particular modern dimensions. Jumps are defined by a stuff like the run up, the take-off line, and the sandpit; the highjump by the spongy thing, the triple jump by its peculiar rules. Before 1896, people jumped just as they liked, according to local conditions and customs; when they raced, they'd race over 19 or 73 or 3421 metres, between this thing and that thing. Now you'll no glory for being the fastest in the world over 73 metres. The change between old athletics, and modern athletics is analogous to the difference between rounders & baseball, old cricket & new cricket, etc. So I'll stick to saying that the activities that are now called sports (which means a regulatory body, standardised rules, regular leagues, representative teams, statistics and records) did not exist at the beginning of the 19th century.
Incidentally, people hardly even trained for athletics until 50 or so years ago. If you are looking for a change in what people do for a sport *as a whole* and not just what they do at the moments of competion, then perhaps there is no sport more changed than track + field athletics.
douglas