The Origins of Baseball: A completely true history.

Many of you think you know how baseball started.  You all think it may have happened in England or France in those silly years that can be referred to in hundreds:  Thirteen Hundred, Eighteen Hundred (if you think New Jersey possibly ever had any sort of history). Little did you know, the year baseball was invented can’t be measured.  At the time it was invented, nobody kept track of years. 

If you hadn’t guessed yet, cavemen invented baseball.  Not those silly Geico ones who get all pissy about things being easy.  No, baseball was invented by real cavemen with fancy Latin names that I’m too lazy to look up and who lived in caves, rather than swanky New York apartments fancier than those in Friends.

 It’s really quite simple.  Cavemen walked around with clubs.  You’ve all seen the pictures.  They’re big, club-like and very handy for swinging around. 

via www.catshoes.com

Cavemen also traveled in groups of nine.  Now, nine seems very arbitrary but it turns that nine is the optimal number of people living in a cave.  It provides the right amount of people for hunting, drawing weird things on walls and taking down a wooly mammoth.  Strangely, one mammoth only provided enough wool for nine shirts.  No cave’s shirts looked like any other cave’s due to cavemen’s lack of ability to build factories that could produce consistent goods.  Totally missed the boat on that one.  Also, mammoths had different color fur, so every cave’s shirts would be a different color.

via www.mccullagh.org

So you’d have nine cavemen with clubs and matching shirts wandering around.  They’d encounter another group of cavemen.  They’d know these new cavemen weren’t from their cave because the shirts were different colors and design.  Cavemen couldn’t count so they relied on the shirts.

Both groups would be going for the same food or other resource.  Chalk for cave drawings was pretty scarce back in the day.  Of course, they couldn’t share so there was a fight.  Being that both groups had clubs and were of equal numbers, it never went well for either side.  The group with the on average bigger guys would "win" the day, if you can call having have your face broken "winning."

One day, a smaller caveman picked up a rock as he moped away following the usual defeat.  In his angsty state, he threw it at the cavemen enjoying the grachunk (roughly translated as yellow chalk) he so desperately wanted.  He was drawing a nice sunset and needed some shading.

Back to the rock…so he throws it.  It hits one of the other cavemen.  All cavemen were strong.  So even a small guy was the size of an Urlacher.  This thrown rock was huge.  It knocked out the caveman.  The numbers were now reduced!  The loser cavemen now became the winner cavemen and got their grachunk!  Sadly, the sunset was a major disappointment.

via www.ufoevidence.org

But now the cavemen figured out a way to get around clubs.  A new dynamic existed for a while.  This was the rock-throwing era.  The caves with the best throwers now dominated. 

Again, one day, a group of cavemen got pinned by a posse with a few good throwers.  One of the throwers hit one of the clubs.  Clubs were still in use to subdue and tenderize meat.  The caveman got an idea.  When the next rock came, he actually swung at it.  It connected!  The first ever swing in the history of everything was a hit!  It went right back to the thrower and hit him.

This was a new dynamic:  throwing, swinging, trying not to get hit by the hit.   Some of the cavemen managed to hide behind objects that could stop a rock.  In cave-ese,  these objects were called "gruntrunk," which translates to "base." But not everyone could fit behind one base, so they needed another defense mechanism.

via images.travelpod.com

This one took a lot longer for the cavemen to figure out how to deal with, lack of factories and whatnot.  They realized their faces were catching the rocks.  So they tried catching with their hands.  But that still hurt, and often didn't leave much of their hand behind, so they wanted a cushion.  They found a use for excess mammoth meat.  That got messy…and it went bad quickly.  Long process short, they started using folded plant leaves (plants were a lot bigger in the day) and stuffing them with excess mammoth fur.   That made far less mess.  Now they’d invented rudimentary gloves and could stop the rocks.

But now they were back to the original stalemate because the groups could break down into specialties:  catching, throwing, rock smacking.  There was no advantage.  And cavemen were getting really tired of beating each other up.  It really was hurting their ability to take over the world.  Imagine how easy a caveman was to eat for a raptor after the cavemen had half his bones broken by large rocks.  There’s no chance.

 A new trend developed.  The cavemen realized how much they were hurting the future by constantly fighting over chalk, so rather than beating on each other, they would challenge the other group to a game of hurgrunt (translated as Rocksmash).  Each group would take their best thrower and get one shot at each of the opposing group’s members.  The swinger would get a chance to swing to defend himself.  They got a point if nobody caught the hit.  But if he missed, it hit him or it was caught, no point.  Then switch it up.  Whoever scored the most won (yay for Captain Obvious).  They’d get the food, grachunk or gloating rights. 

 Through time, their game evolved into using outs, multiple swings, running to the bases, giving more credit to rocks hit further, etc.   Not only did they create a game, baseball saved humanity!  They were tougher for raptors to eat since they weren’t all beat up, and raptors wouldn’t touch a group of 18.

 As you can see by this definitive, totally non-made up history, cavemen were the inventors of baseball.  This will be replacing the Wikipedia article shortly.