Which sport uses a bat and a ball and has home runs?

Baseball, whose founding story is a fabrication. The tale that Abner Doubleday invented it at Cooperstown in 1839 came from a commission set up in 1905 specifically to prove the game was American rather than descended from English rounders - which it is. Doubleday was at West Point that year and never mentioned baseball in his life. The Hall of Fame is at Cooperstown anyway.

The game is unusual in having no clock. It ends when the innings are done, so a team behind cannot run out of time - only out of outs - which is why comebacks in the ninth are structurally possible in a way they are not in football. It is also the only major sport where the defence holds the ball.

It has become the most heavily measured game ever played. Every pitch is tracked for speed, spin rate and movement to the centimetre, and the resulting statistics reshaped how teams are built - the Moneyball approach of buying undervalued skills rather than reputations. That analytical turn has since spread to essentially every professional sport, and it started here because baseball is a sequence of discrete, isolated events, which is exactly what statistics like.