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Sports: Baseball
Surprisingly little is known about the origin of baseball. The question has been the subject of considerable debate and controversy for more than 100 years. Baseball (and softball), as well as the other modern bat, ball and running games, cricket and rounders, developed from earlier folk games, many of which were similar to each other, but there were certainly local, regional and national variations, both in how they were played and what they were called, such as stoolball, poison ball, and goal ball. Few details of how the modern games developed from earlier folk games are known. Some think that various folk games resulted in a game called town ball from which baseball was eventually born.
A number of early folk games in England had characteristics that can be seen in modern baseball (as well as in cricket and rounders). Many of these early games involved a ball that was thrown at a target while an opposing player defended the target by attempting to hit the ball away. If the batter successfully hit the ball, he could attempt to score points by running between bases while fielders would attempt to catch or retrieve the ball and put the runner out in some way.
