Although some Americans seem a bit skeptical about the news that Russians invented baseball, or lapta, as it has been known for the past 60 or 70 Soviet pennant races, the matter is old hat to knowledgeable fans. As Izvestia recently explained to its readers, Russian emigres brought their ancient national pastime to what is now California 200 years ago, with batters striking at a ball with a stick and fielders throwing the ball at opposition players to register outs.
The Russian origin of American baseball is a simple fact and a closed issue, but Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, jocularly dubbed "Goose Glasnost" by the Professional Lapta Writers Association, has graciously allowed speculation on how the game actually got to America. Pravda believes it was stolen by a Marine guard at the U.S. embassy in Moscow who scurrilously wheedled details of lapta out of an unwary Russian cook during an evening of illicit and probably drug-induced lovemaking sometime during the mid-19th century.
Another school of thought holds that the game arose in the 10th century and was brought to America by one of the earliest people's explorers, Eric the Red, who is said to have founded a team named for himself in what is now Cincinnati. Other equally respected laptologists maintain that the spirited game evolved from the famous sporting rides of the cossacks. In this view, games occurred spontaneously on the Russian steppes, with peasants hurling stones up at the fabled horsemen in attempts to achieve outs, while the free- swinging cossacks were responsible for most of the offense. The amazing success of the cossacks, who often went undefeated for decades at a time, is sometimes cited by Izvestia as proof that polo as well as baseball originated in sports-minded Russia.
This pro-cossack school generally aligns itself with Izvestia's West Coast theory of American baseball. In this opinion, the first American team was not the Cincinnati Reds but the Los Angeles Engels, named for the wealthy crony who liked to toss the lapta around with Karl Marx, the first great theoretician of the game and the main reason why so many modern lapta stars have been nicknamed Lefty. Marx and Engels introduced the dialectical theory of lapta: the pitchers are always ahead of the hitters, and vice versa. Marx's classic one-liner about lapta, "Nice right-wing deviationists finish last," ranks with Lenin's famous admonition about the Russian psyche: "Anyone who wishes to understand the Russian soul had better learn lapta."
It is Stalin and his successors, though, who deserve credit for expanding the ancient national pastime from a merely local amusement to a truly global game. The historic postwar expansion brought coveted big league franchises to such deserving cities as Warsaw, Budapest, Havana, Prague and now even Kabul, where an all-rookie team of Afghan players altered traditional notions of defense by employing the first heat-seeking laptas during regular-season play. Much like the introduction of the corked bat and the designated hitter in the U.S., the Afghan innovation has clearly irritated a few hidebound older fans back in Moscow, who constantly demand that the commissioner "lower the mound" in mountainous Afghanistan to bring offense and defense back into classic balance.