In his landmark book Baseball Before We Knew It, David Block
reprinted this seminal article by Per Maigaard of Denmark among
several primary-source appendixes. We reprint it here with
David’s kind permission. Maigaard’s “Battingball Games” was,
David wrote, “the first modern attempt to compare, classify and
trace the origins of games played with bat and ball. The
author’s command of written English was somewhat awkward, and
the following article is presented in its original, unedited
form.” It was initially published in Genus, journal of the
Comitato Italiano per lo Studio dei Problemi Della Popolazione,
Rome, Italy, Vol. 5, N. 1-2, 1941, pp. 57-72. Maigaard’s 1941
article is important, but for a current understanding of how
baseball arose from other bat and ball games, one must read
Baseball Before We Knew It. For but one example, Block has
demonstrated that baseball did not derive from rounders but is
in fact the older of the two games. Much of Maigaard’s article
below takes issue with the earlier findings