You're IT!

I was reading an article Friday evening about the origins of baseball, but that's not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about today is something that the article mentioned just in passing.

The article stated that some claimed that baseball was around at least during the Revolutionary War, as one American soldier named George Ewing described a game called "base" that was played at Valley Forge. The article discounts that, though, going on to say that the game of "base" didn't have a ball or bat, but was much more like the game of tag that we all played as kids where someone would chase you and try to tag you before you got to base, hence the name of the game.

The article then went on to describe where baseball actually came from, but I was left thinking, "Our soldiers were playing TAG during war time?!?" That seems so weird to me to think of a guy in one of those pointy revolutionary hats and with a musket rifle lying over against a log cabin getting involved in a spirited game of tag!

Can you imagine some of our soldiers in Kabul today doing this? The lieutenant comes out of the barracks to find some of the off duty soldiers chasing each other around the compound and shouting "Ollie, Ollie, Oxen free!" He might be tempted to ignore the Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy.