Glossary of Games
A compilation of 329 games resembling baseball
Those attempting to learn about the origins of baseball confront a large zoo of different games that are candidates as modern baseball's predecessors. Even more complicated is the array of names for those games as they evolved over the years; some games appear to have sported different names, depending on the region and the era of play; and some names – including “baseball” -- have been used for rather different games.
This glossary is intended to provide a focus for our learning, as a group of researchers, about the full range of “safe-haven” games and their names. We hope that users will add other games, and tell us of mistakes in the current version. We chose to call this set of games “safe haven” games because what they seem to have in common: a set of bases where players gain immunity from being put out, and for which a round trip results in a run. (Some writers have called these games the “stick and ball” games, which would, if taken literally, embrace croquet and golf and tennis, etc., and would exclude kick-ball and punch-ball and all games played with "cats" -- short sticks -- instead of balls. Tom Altherr has used the term “baseball-like games,” and Richard Hershberger uses “the baseball family” to denote the class of games of interest. [Richard thus denotes a subset of the baseball kind of games, but omitting non-US games, two-base games, games arising after 1870, and the o’cat games]. Doubtless future usage will define agreeable generic terms to better convey what we all mean.)
On this site, we have put games into 6 "families" based on their main characteristics, with the "baseball family" reserved for those that seem closest to baseball as we now know it, and the mysterious "hook 'em snivy" grouping for games whose rules we don't even know yet. These are plainly arbitrary classes, but we think we have to start somewhere.
Predecessor and Derivative Games
Taking the now-familiar features of 1857-rules base ball as a good approximation of "modern" baseball, we are assembling a Protoball registry of both [a] earlier baserunning games and [b] games that seem to have derived from modern baseball. <<put counter/counters here?>>
Baseball
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