Baseball There is evidence that stick and ball games have been played since the earliest dawn of civilization. Ancient cultures, in Persia, Egypt, and Greece, played stick-and-ball games for fun and as part of certain ceremonies. Games of this type spread throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and became popular in various forms. Europeans introduced similar games to their American colonies around the 16th century. There are, despite the popular version of the origin of baseball created by Doubleday, numerous references to the terms "baseball" and "bat-and-ball" in documents from the early years of the 18th century.3 The origin of baseball should actually be defined as the evolution of baseball, because based on what historians of the game have been finding, it is a derivation of the game "stool ball" that dates back to the Middle Ages and, in turn, the "stool ball" comes from ritual games practiced in the ancient world. The first reference to...
