On July 9, 2006 at 02:14, Daniel Tonks said...
I was just looking through a 1962 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica (don't ask why I have
it hanging around) for an "older" point of view
on baseball, and it goes through this whole commission
appointed by (who else) National league presidents
and players in 1908 to prove that baseball was
"a distinctly American sport [that] had no connection
with rounders or any other foreign game".
However, it then goes through disproving the report
and starts off with "A Little Pretty Pocket-Book"
as the oldest known reference to something very
much like today's baseball, then spends pages
talking about various other games with similar
rules between then and the 1839 so-called "invention"
by Doubleday.
So which do you go with - the creationist or evolutionary theory?