Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
Unfortunately (and rather obviously) that's not true. Finnish baseball or "pesäpallo" is not derived from baseball, or at least not baseball alone.
Vaguely cricket-like ball-games have been played in Europe for at least 500 years, and local variants used to be common. In Finland between something like 1870's and 1900's there was a popular game/activity called "kuningaspallo" (kingball) which was one of these vaguely cricket-like games. As was typical, this game was more an activity or a children's game than a sport.
Baseball was one major influence in turning kuningaspallo into the sport now known as pesäpallo, but the creator of pesäpallo Tahko Pihkala (a distant relative of mine btw) was also studying the rules of other similar ball games, such the Swedish långball (also now mostly forgotten) for rules ideas.
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I think American baseball is just based on the old English children's game of baseball or rounders going back a few hundred years anyways. Americans just Americanized it by building big stadiums, marketing the hell out of it, playing it on steroids, and calling themselves champions of the world.