Sports Then and Now

Thanks to instant replay will baseball arguments soon be a thing of the past?

A baseball manager is having a meltdown and starts yelling before he even leaves the dugout. He leaps onto the field, gesturing wildly, and strides across the field until his face is inches away from the ump’s. He may toss his hat in disgust, shout some expletives and get thrown out of the game. The manager meltdown is a revered baseball tradition, but instant replay could be taking it away.

In addition to using pure gut instinct to decide whether to ask for an instant replay, managers have to know which plays are the most statistically important. They don’t want to burn up their single replay on an unimportant play. Fans who love to bet on baseball will be watching just how well managers handle their instant replay strategies. It’s something that could recharge the game, just like many changes from the past have done.

Of course, baseball isn’t a sport whose fans thrive on change. Additions like gloves, batting helmets and numbered uniforms, at one time, were enough to initiate some serious fan meltdowns. Let’s take a look back at how baseball has coped with big changes in the past. If the past is the best predictor of the future, instant replay will work out just fine. Read the rest of this entry →

Before it became America’s pastime, before all of the performance-enhancing drugs, before the Babe, before the Big Red Machine, and even before the Yankees wore pinstripes, baseball began. Like many things that began long ago, the origins of the game of baseball are unclear. Although the puzzle may not be entirely complete, we certainly have plenty of pieces which show us the path that was taken to get to how baseball is played today. From its roots across the pond to the development of more modern rules, baseball’s genesis was not one simple event in sports history.

Rounders

Just as football developed from an alternative way to play rugby, baseball wasn’t created out of thin air. Instead, it came from an old English game known as “rounders”. Rounders was derived from the sport of cricket, but with some obvious differences, such as running in a more circular path rather than a straight back and forth one. As baseball’s ancestor, rounders lent its diamond shape to the modern game, as well as having a pitcher located within the diamond, though in rounders the pitcher is called the “bowler”. Read the rest of this entry →