Hiller - Baseball

Origins of baseball

Main article: Origins of baseball

The story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 was once widely promoted and widely believed, but there was and is no evidence for this claim, except for the testimony of one man decades after the fact, and there is a great deal of persuasive counter-evidence. Doubleday left many letters and papers, but they contain no description of baseball or even a suggestion that he considered himself a prominent person in the history of the game. His New York Times obituary makes no mention of baseball, nor does a 1911 encyclopedia article about Doubleday.

The distinct evolution of baseball from among the various bat-and-ball games is difficult to trace with precision. Oina, a very similar bat-and-ball traditional game played in Romania was mentioned for the first time during the rule of King Vlaicu Vodă, in 1364. Typically, consensus was that today's baseball is a North American development from the older game rounders, however a 2005 book Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, by David Block, and historical evidence argues against that notion.^[6] Several references to "baseball" and "bat-and-ball" have been found in British and American documents of the early eighteenth century. The earliest known description is in a 1744 British publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by John Newbery.^[7] It contains a wood-cut illustration of boys playing "base-ball," showing a baseball set-up roughly similar to the modern game, and a rhymed description of the sport. However, on September 11, 2008, the Surrey County Council's History Centre gave documentary proof that the game was being played by the British before anywhere else and have written to Major League Baseball explaining this^[8]. The diarist William Bray recorded a game of baseball on Easter Monday 1755 in Guildford^[9]. The earliest known unambiguous American discussion of "baseball" was published in a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts town bylaw, which prohibited the playing of the game within 80 yards (70 m) of the town's new meeting house.^[10] The English novelist Jane Austen made a reference to children playing "base-ball" on a village green in her book Northanger Abbey, which was written between 1798 and 1803 (though not published until 1818).^[11]

The first full documentation of a baseball game in North America is Dr. Adam Ford's contemporary description of a game that took place in 1838 on June 4 (Militia Muster Day) in Beachville, Ontario, Canada; this report was related in an 1886 edition of Sporting Life magazine in a letter by former St. Marys, Ontario, resident Dr. Matthew Harris.^[12]

In 1845, Alexander Cartwright of New York City led the codification of an early list of rules (the so-called Knickerbocker Rules), from which today's rules have evolved.^[13] He had also initiated the replacement of the soft ball used in rounders with a smaller hard ball.^[14] While there are reports of Cartwright's club, the New York Knickerbockers, playing games in 1845, the game now recognized as the first in U.S. history to be officially recorded took place on June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey^[15], with the "New York Nine"^[16] defeating the Knickerbockers, 23–1, in four innings.^[17]

On June 3, 1953, the United States Congress officially recognized Cartwright as the inventor of modern baseball.