> In baseball, the pitcher and catcher are collectively known by which term?And the answer: battery. Photo courtesy: FanSided.comIn baseball, the battery consists of a pitcher andcatcher from the same team, usually the combo that's in the game. It's believedthe term was coined in the 1860s by sports historian Henry Chadwick, whocompared the "firepower" of a team’s pitching staff to that of the artillerybatteries used in the American Civil War.Baseball is a complex sport, with a rulebook hundreds of pages long. While it'sbeen played in various forms throughout history, a 1905 investigation into theorigins of the sport laid claim to its beginnings in early America, at the handof a man named Abner Doubleday. Hailing from Cooperstown, New York, Doubledaypurportedly created the sport one summer in 1839, instantly creating an Americanclassic which would, from then on, honor its players at a hall of fame from hiscity.However, the commission assigned with this task failed to thoroughly fact checkor conduct any further investigation on the matter. It was soon revealed thatthis story was likely fibbed (or at least poorly remembered), drawing from theaccount of one mining engineer named Abner Graves, who was a schoolmate ofDoubleday. Instead, the real history of baseball in the United States dates backto the 18th century. Its most direct ancestors appear to be two English games:rounders (a children’s game brought to New England by the earliest colonists)and cricket. The game grew in popularity after the American Revolution, findinginterest in schoolyards and playgrounds, and again after the IndustrialRevolution. In 1845, a group of men in New York formed the first baseball team, or as it wasknown at the time, the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club. The club would putforth a set of rules that began its codified differentiation from sports likecricket, and contains updates that are still a part of the game today. Learn more about the history of this fascinating sport here[https://www.npr.org/2011/03/16/134570236/the-secret-history-of-baseballs-earliest-days].