[UmpJM]

voiceoflg,

From what I have read, both baseball and cricket evolved (or was it simply an intelligent design??) from an earlier game called Rounders, which was more similar to cricket than to baseball.

Under the rules of cricket, the hands are explicitly, by rule, treated as "part of the bat", as SD Steve alluded to in his earlier post. In baseball, the hands, by rule, are treated as part of the player's "person".

It has been suggested to me that the "historical" origin of the "hands are part of the bat" myth in baseball is that is how they were treated in the progenitor game of rounders. This tradition carried on in cricket, but was changed in baseball.

While I certainly find this theory plausible, I have never found anything that definitively says this is the derivation of the myth (and I've looked).

JM