At long last, baseball has returned. After a nearly five-month delay, the 2020 Major League Baseball season got underway last week with an opening night game in the nation’s capital between the New York Yankees and the reigning World Series champion the Washington Nationals. Of course, everything is not as it was. Fans cannot attend games, simulated noise is being pumped into empty stadiums, and catchers and umpires are no longer the only ones wearing masks.
Along with the shortened 60-game regular season, there are new rule changes as well. Some of these, such as the National League adopting a designated hitter and pitchers being required to face a minimum of three batters, were planned beforehand. Others, such as the prohibition on spitting in dugouts and team facilities and ending the pregame exchange of lineup cards (now submitted electronically via app), were ad hoc, thanks to the coronavirus.
Yet unfamiliar as these changes may seem, it has always been thus with baseball, even from its very beginnings. Bat-and-ball games have themselves been around for millennia. The Cantigas de Santa Maria, a medieval collection of 420 religious poems and songs dating from around 1280, depicts a game in which a ball is hit with a stick while others try to catch it.
The earliest known mention of the “baseball” comes from a 1744 British children’s book, A Little Pretty Pocket Book, which includes a rhymed explanation of a game called “base-ball” and a depiction showing a triangular field setup complete with batter, pitcher (then called a “bowler”), and three rounders posts as bases. Indeed, it is often held that baseball was an American evolution of rounders, a similar bat-and-ball game played in England since the time of the Tudors. Yet in his Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, historian David Block argues convincingly that Americans simply adopted the core of what we know as baseball (as opposed to developing it from a related game), as the game was established in its essential form in England by the late 18th century.
Nevertheless, and much like our nation itself, it took American innovations on the English model for the game to truly shine. In September 1845, William Wheaton, Alexander Cartwright, and their New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club formally adopted new rules for the game, such as the three-out inning, that would become the basis for competitive professional baseball. But rules themselves continued to change. It was not until 1872, for example, that pitchers were permitted to snap their wrists as they released the ball, which at that point still had to be released below the waist. It wasn’t until 1887 that pitchers could even throw overhand.
With rule changes came new developments to the game, largely for the better. Without new rules restricting how many pitches could miss the strike zone, William “Candy” Cummings may have never invented the curveball. Who knows what innovations our 2020 season will bring?
