Baseball’s genesis up for debate

I read in The New York Times over the weekend that historians are still hard at work trying to figure out precisely where and when the game of baseball originated.

The theories are endless, with new ones entering the debate all the time. The first version of the game’s genesis came about when historians proclaimed that baseball had been invented in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839. That long-held theory eventually went out the window when someone decided that the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J., was the game’s true spawning grounds, and even came up with the proof in a couple of 1823 newspaper articles that referred to “base ball” games being played in Lower Manhattan.

Last May, according to the Times, its birthplace was shifted once again when a library clerk in Pittsfield, Mass., stunned sports historians by producing from a vault a 1791 ordinance banning the playing of “baseball” within 80 yards of a big church in the town square. Some historians say the first baseball game was played in the 18th century, while others say there is historic evidence suggesting that the game was played as long ago as the 13th century. Neither is there any agreement, the article explains, over historical records that trace the game’s roots to either North America, Europe or even Africa.

“People ask: when was the first baseball game?” the sports historian John Thorn told the Times. “It may be an unanswerable question. That’s what makes it eternally fascinating.”

I am no baseball historian, having always preferred the sights, sounds and smells of the beautiful game to the mountains of statistics and trivia that are the underpinnings of the modern sport. But I am sure of one thing. Baseball was not invented at all, so to speak, but evolved instead over the ages from the orderly combination of some of the most natural physical movements that people engage in for pleasure even before they’ve seen their first Red Sox or Little League game.

Strip a modern baseball game of its rules, uniforms, groomed diamonds, oiled gloves and umpires, and what’s left standing out on the field is nothing but a bunch of kids having a blast by whacking an object with a stick and then catching and throwing it around.

Place a little plastic bat in the hands of a 1-year-old and the kid will almost immediately use it to thump the nearest round object, which may often be the head of a sibling or parent. Place a toddler on the shores of a lake and in no time he’ll be flinging into the water every stone he can get his mitts on.

To suggest that an individual one day dreamed up an activity that for the first time put those most basic of recreational impulses into play is as silly as saying someone got the bright idea to kick a ball down a field and call it soccer, or toss a ball into a peach basket and give rise to the NBA. Perhaps baseball exists because it just happens to be the perfect embodiment of all of our most basic forms of play.

Yet for nearly a century now, historians have doggedly tried to unearth the origin of a sport as wrapped in legend as the Holy Grail. I suppose their persistence is a testament to the captivating nature of the game, and its honored place in the American consciousness. But, according to the Times, they’ve got a lot of digging left to do: In the Baseball Hall of Fame is a reproduction of an ancient Egyptian wall suggesting that even pharoahs played a form of baseball, too.