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.
A game of rounders on Christmas Day at Baroona, Glamorgan Vale, Australia in 1913.
A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), included an illustration of base-ball, depicting a batter, a bowler, and several rounders posts. The rhyme refers to the ball being hit, the boy running to the next post, and then home to score.
A game of rounders being played in Nowton, England
A batter is attempting to give a good hit
Bat-and-ball games are field games played by two opposing teams. Action starts when the defending team throws a ball at a dedicated player of the attacking team, who tries to hit it with a bat and run between various safe areas in the field to score runs (points). The defending team can use the ball in various ways against the attacking team's players to force them off the field when they are not in safe zones, and thus prevent them from further scoring. The best known modern bat-and-ball games are cricket and baseball, with common roots in the 18th-century games played in England.
Young men playing a bat-and-ball game in a 13th-century manuscript of the Galician Cantigas de Santa Maria.
