15 William D. Parish, A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect (Lewes, 1875); Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland, I, 34, 217-20. Many other folk games have been identified as ancestors of baseball—stoolball, rounders and cat. Stoolball was a game more like cricket but in which the ball was driven from stool to stool. Cat was generally very different—a game in which a small piece of wood was driven with sticks toward a defended hole. Rounders was, I think, a 19th-century invention; I find no reference before 1856. Gomme’s American reference to stoolball is inaccurate; the game was played not in Massachusetts Bay but in Plymouth on the second Christmas, much to William Bradford’s displeasure.
16 Isaiah Thomas, A Little Pretty Pocket Book (Worcester, 1787).
17 Jennie Holliman, American Sport, 1785-1835 (Durham, N.C., 1931), 65-66.
18 Harold Seymour, Baseball, The Early Years (New York, 1980), 7.