I hope many of you have been able to watch the highly acclaimed documentary “Base Ball Discovered”, which has been airing on the MLB Network.

As explained in Mark Newman’s article on MLB.com, the film explores the roots of the sport by heading to England to discover how our bat-and-ball games may have influenced the game that became America’s National Pastime.

As a result of this project, a fascinating discovery was made.  A local historian in the county of Surrey found a hand-written diary from 1755 in her shed.  That’s quite a special thing to find in any event, yet its significance increased dramatically when it was realised that it contains a reference to a person playing a game called ‘baseball’.

This discovery was picked in the Press in Britain last September.  I wrote an article about the news at BaseballGB at the time, putting it into the context of other ‘baseball’-related discoveries in Britain and what they mean in regards to the game played in America.

The crucial point is that these discoveries show that a bat-and-ball game (or probably many different variations of a game) referred to as baseball, or more commonly base ball, was being played in England in the mid-sixteenth century. Nothing more, nothing less.

Some of the British news articles devoid of much research on the topic adopted a triumphant imperial tone, basically stating that the ‘Bray Diary’ showed that we (i.e. the Brits) had invented baseball. 

Anyone with any knowledge of how sports (and most other parts of popular culture) evolve over many years knows that such a simplistic cause and effect conclusion is unhelpful.  The game described by William Bray in his diary would probably have only had a passing resemblance to the game played even by the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869, never mind the game we know as baseball today. 

Yet that doesn’t mean the discovery is unimportant. The baseball played in America wasn’t created out of thin air and it seems logical that people who emigrated took British bat-and-ball games with them to their new homes.  There doesn’t need to be a direct link from the ‘baseball’ seen by William Bray to MLB 2009 for it to part of the same story. 

While the Doubleday Myth has been comprehensively disproved, the creation of a standardized version of baseball in America and the way it was embraced as the National Pastime remains untarnished.  If games called baseball were being played in England back in 1755, which they clearly were, then that just adds another strand to the fascinating history of the sport. 

Further resources to explore

If you are interested in finding out more about baseball and other bat-and-ball games historically played in Britain, here are a few key websites to visit.

Even though it is in its formative stages, the Project for the Chronicling of British Baseball (Project Cobb) has already been responsible for a number of achievements.  These have included the creation of an archive for the Great Britain National team and making the British baseball publication Baseball Mercury, edited by baseball historian William Morgan from 1972 until 1989, available online.  Learn more about this exciting project at http://www.projectcobb.org.uk/cobb.html

The UK chapter of SABR has done a lot of great work exploring the history of bat-and-ball games in Britain.  Unfortunately their website, http://www.sabruk.org/ , is down at the moment.  Hopefully it will be live again soon.

Finally, just to reinforce the point that ‘Baseball’ is what you want it to be, it’s worth noting that there is a game called baseball played in parts of Wales and England that few Americans would recognise.  Most baseball in Britain does follow the standard ‘North American’ template and this other variation is normally referred to as Welsh or British baseball to distinguish the two.  It’s a combination of North American baseball, rounders and cricket.  More information can be found at http://www.welshbaseball.co.uk/