There is a great book called "Baseball Before We Knew It" that provides good evidence that baseball did not come from rounders but that both games were parallel developments of an earlier English game referred to as "Base Ball".
Amusingly, a memoir by an 18th Century royal governess mentions that one child who played the English "base ball" game was the future King George III -- the guy we revolted against.
Sadly I see no mention of Hoboken which also lays claim to being the birthplace of baseball. According to Retrosheet it is also the birthplace of 11 major leaguers, with the most recent being Orlando Palmiero, who had a non-descript 13-year career, mostly with the Angels where he won a ring backing up Tim Salmon in RF in 2002. The most famous Hobokenites are probably Johnny Kucks, who went to Dickinson in Jersey City and won the last World Series game played in Ebbets Field for the Yankees, and Bill Kunkel, who played three seasons in the AL but became much more famous as an umpire
There is a great book called "Baseball Before We Knew It" that provides good evidence that baseball did not come from rounders but that both games were parallel developments of an earlier English game referred to as "Base Ball".
Amusingly, a memoir by an 18th Century royal governess mentions that one child who played the English "base ball" game was the future King George III -- the guy we revolted against.
Sadly I see no mention of Hoboken which also lays claim to being the birthplace of baseball. According to Retrosheet it is also the birthplace of 11 major leaguers, with the most recent being Orlando Palmiero, who had a non-descript 13-year career, mostly with the Angels where he won a ring backing up Tim Salmon in RF in 2002. The most famous Hobokenites are probably Johnny Kucks, who went to Dickinson in Jersey City and won the last World Series game played in Ebbets Field for the Yankees, and Bill Kunkel, who played three seasons in the AL but became much more famous as an umpire
John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden also provides some great insight into the origins of the game. This is a fun subject.
Fascinating! I'd never heard of "One Old Cat" (let alone two, three, or four).