Baseball Diaries II: Ich Bin Ein
Baseball
Baseball is the American national past time. It is a game with long traditions.
It evolved from medieval bat-and-ball games,
It found its way to America, where it also gave rise to both American baseball and its slower, gentler cousin, softball. Today's rounders is actually more similar to softball than baseball.
However, Americans have never appreciated this explanation. They organized a 3-year study into the matter, the 1905 Mills Commission, which concluded that the origin of the game was not Rounders, and, for goodness' sake, definitely not the 13th century precursor of today's Basque pelota, but, for sure, it was a uniquely American invention of Abner Doubleday in Copperstown, New York. Go figure.
That determination was done through "patriotism and research", which included an audience of 300 chanting "No rounders!". Apparently, it was convincing.
Side Note for Bloggy Bobb
As Bloggy Bobb correctly pointed out as a comment to the original post (of which this is a derivation), the history of baseball is uncertain, and similar types of games have been played by various cultures in various places. For example, the game of "hoina/oină" has been played by shepherds for a very very long time in the region of the Lower Danube. I agree. That game, now called oină, is still played in today's Romania.
There are (few 🙁) articles written on the "forgotten Romanian sport" that might be important when examining the origins of American baseball. (Interestingly, the Czech game of Pasák is very similar to oină, both in the action and in the meaning of the word - more about that later.)
The current name, oină, is similar to the Romanian word for sheep, oaie (from Latin ovem), so much so that Google Translate will actually translate oină as sheep. 😀
However, the original word hoina comes from the Cuman word oyn, which means "game". Cumans were nomads that inhabited vast stretches of Eurasia, from the Danube to Lake Baikal. Many of them fled from the Golden Horde and many found asylum in Hungary, as well as other places, including Wallachia (now Romania) and Moldavia. Today, they seem to be mostly living in the areas around Kazakhstan. However, their language became the lingua franca (common/bridge language) of the Golden Horde, the lands it controlled, and beyond. Golden Horde was an originally Mongol, then Turkicized khanate which dominated (and brutalized) the entire region between the 12th and the 15th century, until Ivan III, the first Russian "tzar" routed them out. Well, the Black Death of the 14th century, the most fatal pandemic in human history, also helped a great deal. 💀
The earliest documented instance of hoina being played is from the end of the 14th century. However, the picture I posted above is actually from an earlier time than that: it is from 13th century Spain, from the 42nd (here we go: 42 again!) of the 420 Cantigas, by Alfonso X el Sabio, which are sort of poetic hymns that are accompanied by detailed paintings of life at that time, including that funny baseballish theme.
By the way, Alfonso X was not only the king of Castile, but also a prolific poet, who encouraged science and art and was responsible for translating a lot of material from Arabic, including e.g. a book on chess. Alfonso had a whole bunch of children both legitimate and illegitimate, one even with his own aunt, and there were family squabbles including a civil war against his own son.
Disclaimer
I actually don't like baseball. I find it a boring game and can't really watch it with any interest. Cricket, of course, is even more boring and I like it even less, except for those few seconds when the game actually is interesting, just like in baseball.
Ich bin Ein Baseballer
Note for the uninitiated: the above is a silly reference to the famous phrase, "Ich bin ein Berliner", in the famous anti-communist speech by the US president John F Kennedy. It was a phrase adapted from his older speech that used "civis Romanus sum" ("I am a citizen of Rome") to indicate a feeling of belonging, pride and commitment. He said so with some errors, in a heavy Bostonian accent, which led some to later (incorrectly) say that the way he said it actually meant "I am a jelly doughnut". That is not quite true, but it would be kinda funny. It would have been well received, anyway, even if it were true, because it offered the very much needed message of support and it did so when it was most needed. Times were tough, the world was on the brink of the Cold War turning hot, and Berlin would be the first of the battlegrounds. Eventually the Berliner phrase became more famous than the speech itself.
So, about baseball.
Stick It To The Man
As a boy, I played some baseball or varieties thereof, mostly because it was a sport not popular with others and not approved by the ruling communists. Quite the opposite: it was a sport mostly associated with the Americans and therefore to be despised. And that was also a big reason why we played it, because we despised the despisers.
Of course, there was absolutely no access to any baseball equipment. You could not buy it. So we had to improvise. The baseball itself could be improvised. The gloves could be skipped - for example, if you call them "just for sissies", people will not want to use them, anyway. A real man (including the 10-year old thin muscle-less variety thereof) will not want to have anything to do with any such things, even if it means that catching the ball will then hurt like hell, if you ever manage.
The baseball bats, however, were needed and therefore we made our own. Professional tools like a proper spindle, especially on a solid lathe, were out of our reach. I made mine with axe and knife. I did not quite understand the finer points of baseball bat design or the rules on size, weight and shape. My bat ended looking like the ugly monster offspring of a ménage à trois between a baseball bat, a cricket bat, and an unfinished 2x4 piece of lumber. But I did try to play and even though I did not understand the rules and did not connect with the ball very much, I did enjoy it, mostly because the forbidden game was my own way, a 10-year old warrior way, of "sticking it to the man".
Curiously, the name of the game, in Czech, was Pasák (technically not exactly the same game, but close enough), which is the same word that is used for a shepherd - who herds sheep - or, also, these days, for a pimp - who herds prostitutes. Today, Czechs use the American spelling and a sort-of American pronunciation for the game, and Pasák typically means just a pimp, with a different word then being used for a shepherd. Some of them even wear, with joy, a "We love baseball" insignia,
where the American spelling is used. Using the term Pasák in the insignia instead would be odd - to most people it would now sound more like "We are making love to a pimp", which probably would not be the message the wearers were trying to convey.
West Side Story
(No, nothing about an American version of Romeo and Juliet or Broadway musicals or even Shakespeare. Only the same story - me and baseball - when I landed in the West. The title sounds catchy and intriguing, only to end up plain and disappointing, just like baseball. 😮 🤣)
When I ended up in the West, where baseball is everywhere, stores are full of baseball bats and gloves, and you can play anywhere, any time, from dawn to dusk without anybody paying any attention, I realized that the game is, for me (don't get offended), actually very very boring. Very boring.
But,
as they
say (who's "they"?), playing is better than watching. So one afternoon
I decided to play some baseball with my university friends in
Montreal. I contributed very
little to the game, except for swinging the bat hopelessly 3 times
before I
could sit down again, and then standing for a rather long time on the
grass,
trying to see what was happening to the game far out there and hoping
that one glorious moment the ball would fly (or roll) my way. It
didn't. I spent most of the afternoon sitting on the bench, sometimes
talking to my friends and drinking beer (not enough). But the view
(of the Montreal skyline) was great, the beer was good, the friends were fun,
so I don't really complain about it. It was a good experience.
So, whether playing is better than watching or watching is better than playing might depend on whom you ask. But it is related to how our brain processes its stimuli and it also might have to do with the functioning of your mirror neurons, as explained below.
Mirror Neurons
Some recent research suggests that watching a game can have a effect similar to (and sometimes stronger than) the effect of actually playing the game. When studying the popularity of the new(ish) Amazon game Crucible (reportedly awesome - slated to compete with industry giants like Fortnite), they (🙂) discovered that the brains of many people are stimulated just by watching others playing - and no, they are not talking about voyeurs. This was ascribed to the phenomenon of "mirror neurons",
which are the neurons (or other structures) in the brain responsible for the reflex of imitating others and expanding on it. It is not quite fully proven or accepted yet, but it is a thing out there. Some say that this kind of a response originates in the inferior frontal cortex and/or the superior parietal lobe.
For the record, I don't like playing computer games. I find them boring. Except, of course, for those very few times when they are not.
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