History of baseball.

 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 the term "base ball" is in 1744, just under 100 years before Abner Doubleday supposedly invented it in Cooperstown, New York in 1839.

In 1744, the first printed evidence of the game 'Base Ball' appeared in England, which was published in a book of children's pastimes. Between that year and 1796, there were several more references to baseball in Europe, giving an account of a small game played by boys and girls. In 1796 the first rules of «base ball» were published in Germany, which shows that, probably, the game was already practiced in that country.

The game migrated from Europe to America in the mid to late 18th century, carried by English settlers who settled in the New World. The first reference to baseball being played in the United States dates back to April 1778, recorded in his diary by Private George Ewing: "I exercised in the afternoon, and at intervals I played base." In 1786, Princeton student John Rhea Smith mentions in his diary that "One fine day I played baste ball(sic) on campus but was beaten because I failed to catch and hit the ball." Later, in 1791, a ban was issued in the town of Pittsfield Massachusetts to “preserve the windows of the new Assembly House…no person shall be permitted to play the games called Wicket, Cricket, Base Ball, Football, Cat, Fives or any other ball game, within a distance of 80 yards from the aforementioned Assembly House.