Jane Austen and Baseball?

Did anyone else catch the reference to cricket and baseball which occurred near the beginning of the excellent tv adaptation of Northanger Abbey?

Baseball?

I can't pretend to be an expert on the recreational pursuits of the age but it didn't quite ring true to me. Was it a reference to an early form of rounders perhaps, did the British really adopt baseball before the Americans, or was it merely a slip of the script-writer's pen? Does anyone know?

Wendy