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Originally Posted by CoachJM
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
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I doubt that a 200 year old rule from rounders that never made it in baseball rulebook to begin with lived on.
I think it more likely that the same stupidity, misunderstanding and childhood memories that keeps people thinking that pictches that hit the dirt before the plate are dead, that the plate is foul and that the tie goes to anybody has more to do with it.