| Palant | |
| Nicknames: | --> |
| First: | mid-1500s |
| Team: | 3+ |
| Type: | Team sport |
| Country/Region: | Poland |
Palant is a Polish bat-and-ball game, similar to American baseball, played by using a solid wooden bat and rubber balls. Similar games are German Schlagball, Russian lapta and Romanian oină.
In his book God's Playground, Norman Davies suggests that baseball may have developed from Palant as played by the first Polish immigrants, such as the Jamestown Polish craftsmen, who arrived in October 1608 on the emigrant ship Mary and Margaret, which brought the first Polish settlers into Jamestown, Virginia. According to Davies, those Polish artisans were said to be responsible for the continent's first industrial strike, and in the game of Palant, for the invention of Baseball.[1]
However, many Native American people played a similar game well before the arrival in the Americas of European people, as recorded in Cherokee sources.[2]
Palant is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 7 to 15 players on a field 60 m long and 25 m wide. The bat, also called "palant," is a 60-cm-long wooden stick that can be round or flattened. The ball has a 5 to 7 cm diameter and is made of rubber. The field is divided into two zones called "heaven", where the batting team is, and "hell," where the defending team is. The game is usually played over two 20-minute halves for a total match time of 40 minutes.
The batting team is trying to maintain the heaven side for as long as possible. A batting player stands on the edge of the field (the heaven line). They have to serve their own ball and hit it so it lands in the other half of the field (in hell). A batting player, after a successful hit, places their palant stick on the heaven line and starts running, through the whole field, to the hell line, and then back to the heaven line. They can stop at the center line and continue their run after the next batting player hits the ball. If the run is successful, the player earns one point. If a batting player misses the ball, they wait until the following batting player hits it successfully, and then they can run along.
The defending team occupies the hell side and seeks to switch sides as quickly as possible. They do it by catching the ball while it's still in the air or by catching the ball after it falls on the ground and eliminating the running heaven players by hitting them with the ball (when all heaven players are eliminated, teams switch sides). A batting player can also be eliminated if they forget to place their palant on the heaven line or if they are still running (not standing on the center or hell line) when the ball, thrown by the defending team, enters the heaven side.
Each team has a "mother" - a privileged player with three attempts at batting.
When the game time ends, the team with the most points wins.[3] [4]