Is it baseball-or Oina?
About the article
This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from March 1990.
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Adding his voice to the decades-old debate over the origin of baseball, a Romanian sports official said the American pastime derived from the ancient game of oina -- which was exported to the United States by a pair of Transylvanians.
The two immigrants from the Romanian village of Alba Iulia joined the U.S. Army and taught the game to their comrades, including a young officer named Doubleday who changed a few rules and created baseball in 1839.
"We are not saying that Romania invented baseball. We would not like someone else to tell us oina was invented by others," said Cristian Costescu, president of the new Romanian Baseball Federation.
"But we are saying this -- some little inspiration for baseball was from oina. Baseball is more sophisticated than oina, but the structure is the same," he said in an interview.
Oina has 11 men per side, with one team batting and the other in the field. Each side is allowed one at-bat, in which all 11 players take the plate. A pitcher is provided by the team at bat and he serves up a lazy underhand toss. The batter tries to hit the ball as far as possible, then has to run 120 meters (393 feet) through nine bases. If he hits the ball far enough, the batter scores one or two points. But if the batter is tagged by a fielder or hit by a thrown ball, the fielders score points -- so teams can score even while not at bat.
The batter does not have to run right after hitting the ball -- in fact, he can wait until two more batters have come to the plate -- and the fielders only can score points while standing within the two-meter (six-foot) base areas.
So the game, which takes about 45-60 minutes to play, becomes a battle of tactics as batters run in groups to protect each other.
Oina uses a ball almost the same size as a baseball but filled with horse hair. The bat is similar to a cricket bat and fielders do not wear gloves.
Romanians claim oina was invented by shepherds in the first century and say documents from 1310 describe a variation of the game called hoina being played in southern Romania.
Oina still is a Romanian national sport, with forms of the game being played in various regions of the Balkan country. Though there are 1,675 teams around Romania, as opposed to about 15 baseball teams in the country, its popularity has slumped in recent years.
