Rounders

This article is about the game. For other uses, see Rounder.

Rounders
A game of rounders on Christmas Day at Baroona, Glamorgan Vale, Australia in 1913.
Highest governing bodyRounders England (England), GAA Rounders (Ireland), a division of the Gaelic Athletic Association[1]
First playedEngland, 1500s (unified rules 1884)
Characteristics
Team members2 teams of 6–15

Rounders is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams. Rounders is a striking and fielding team game that involves hitting a small, hard, leather-cased ball with a wooden, plastic, or metal bat that has a rounded end. The players score by running around the four bases on the field.[2][3]

Played in England since Tudor times, it is referenced in 1744 in the children's book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book where it was called Base-Ball.[4][5] The name baseball was superseded by the name rounders in England, while other modifications of the game played elsewhere retained the name baseball.[6] The game is popular among British and Irish school children, particularly among girls.[4][7][8] As of 2015, rounders is played by an estimated seven million children in the UK.[9]

Gameplay centres on a number of innings, in which teams alternate at batting and fielding. Points (known as 'rounders') are scored by the batting team when one of their players completes a circuit past four bases without being put 'out'. The batter must strike at a good ball and attempt to run a rounder in an anti-clockwise direction around the first, second, and third base and home to the fourth, though they may stay at any of the first three.[4] A batter is out if the ball is caught; if the base to which they are running is touched with the ball; or if, while running, they are touched with the ball by a fielder.[4]

  1. ^ "GAA Rounders – Constitution". Gaelic Athletic Association. Archived from the original on 27 November 2020. Retrieved 7 December 2020.
  2. ^ National Rounders Association – History of the Game in an Archive.org snapshot from 2007
  3. ^ Alice Bertha Gomme, Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland, Volume 2, 1898
  4. ^ a b c d "Rounders (English Game)" Archived 26 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine. Encyclopædia Britannica. "Old English game that never became a seriously competitive sport, although it is probably an ancestor of baseball. The earliest reference to rounders was made in A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744). The game is popular in Great Britain among schoolchildren."
  5. ^ Mike. "Rounders". West Midlands Sports Development. Archived from the original on 24 December 2016. Retrieved 2 March 2018.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Name Origin was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ "Rounders all-round show" Archived 8 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine. Gulf News. 3 March 2011
  8. ^ “Fair Play for Girls and Boys”. Archived 7 September 2012 at the Wayback Machine. National Teachers Organisation. Retrieved 9 March 2018
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference Participation was invoked but never defined (see the help page).