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

Abstract

A common topic of discussion among baseball historians is the question whether baseball is the ancestor of rounders or not. In order to shed new light on this debate, historians need to expand 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. By comparing variants of this game and baseball, as described by Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths in the late eighteenth century, resemblances and connections between English bat-and-ball games and counterparts in Continental Europe are highlighted.