Origins of baseball
However, the game was very significantly altered by amateur men's ball clubs in and around New York City in the middle of the 19th century, and it was this heavily revised sport that became modern baseball.
Very broadly speaking, these games can be roughly divided into forms of longball, where the batter ran out to a single point or line and back, as in cricket, and roundball, where there was a circuit of multiple bases.
The earliest known mention of baseball, as a children's game, dates from the same year (1744) in which the Artillery Ground Laws formalised the rules of what was already a first-class, professional sport sponsored by nobility and upon which vast wagers were laid.
The satisfying ‘thwack’ as heavy ball meets wooden bat; the lush green field dotted with coloured cones, shining under the British summer sun; the grass-stained knees as you slide valiantly past fourth base.
[10][12] In 1828, William Clarke in London published the second edition of The Boy's Own Book, which included the rules of rounders (in fact the earliest known use of that name), and the first printed description in English of a bat and ball base-running game played on a diamond.
156 A 1744 book in England by children's publisher John Newbery called A Little Pretty Pocket-Book includes a woodcut of a game similar to three-base stoolball or rounders and a rhyme entitled "Base-Ball".
[17][18] In 1755, a book entitled The Card by John Kidgell, in volume 1 on page 9, mentions baseball: "the younger Part of the Family, perceiving Papa not inclined to enlarge upon the matter, retired to an interrupted Party at Base-Ball (an infant Game, which as it advances in its teens, improved into Fives).
[b] Notably, Gutsmuths is the earliest author to explicitly mention the use of a bat, although in this case it was a flat wooden paddle about 18 inches long, swung one-handed.
In the first chapter the young English heroine Catherine Morland is described as preferring "cricket, base ball, riding on horseback and running about the country to books".
In her 1820s "Village Sketch" Jack Hatch, author Mary Russell Mitford wrote: Then comes a sun-burnt gipsy of six, beginning to grow tall and thin and to find the cares of the world gathering about her; with a pitcher in one hand, a mop in the other, an old straw bonnet of ambiguous shape, half hiding her tangled hair; a tattered stuff petticoat once green, hanging below an equally tattered cotton frock, once purple; her longing eyes fixed on a game of baseball at the corner of the green till she reaches the cottage door, flings down the mop and pitcher and darts off to her companions quite regardless of the storm of scolding with which the mother follows her runaway steps.
The Mills Commission, at the other extreme, created an "official" and entirely fictional All-American version attributing the game's invention to Abner Doubleday in 1839 at Cooperstown, New York (current site of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum).
"[6] There is a possible reference a generation older, from Harvard; describing the campus buttery in the 1760s, Sidney Willard wrote "Besides eatables, everything necessary for a student was there sold, and articles used in the playgrounds, such as bats, balls etc.
The April 25, 1823 edition of the (New York) National Advocate included this: I was last Saturday much pleased in witnessing a company of active young men playing the manly and athletic game of 'base ball' at the Retreat in Broadway (Jones').
Thurlow Weed in his memoir recalled organized club baseball in Rochester, New York in 1825: Though an industrious and busy place, its citizens found leisure for rational and healthy recreation.
The likelihood is that "base ball" and "rounders" (along with "feeder," "squares" and other names) were regional appellations for the same boys' game played with varying rules in many parts of England from the early 1700s onward.
[36] Along with its relatives stool-ball and the cat games it crossed the ocean with English colonists, and eventually followed its own independent evolutionary path, at the same time that back in England what was now generally called "rounders" was developing separately.
… After the ball was struck, the striker was to run; stones were placed some thirty or forty feet apart, in a circle, and he was to touch each one of them, till he got back to the front from which he started.
However, aside from the artificial intrusion of the person of Doubleday and the village of Cooperstown, the Mills report was not entirely incorrect in its broad outline: a game related to English rounders was played in America from early times; it was supplanted by a variant form which originated in New York circa 1840.
For example, there was no mention of positions or the number of players on a side, the pitching distance was unspecified, the direction of base-running was left open, and it was never stated, though implied, that an "ace" was scored by crossing home plate.
During the regime of three-cornered cat there were no regular bases, but only such permanent objects as a bedded boulder or and old stump, and often the diamond looked strangely like an irregular polygon.
We laid out the ground at Madison Square in the form of an accurate diamond, with home-plate and sand bags for bases… It was found necessary to reduce the new rules to writing.
The new game quickly became very popular with New Yorkers, and the numbers of the club soon swelled beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker.
[45]If Wheaton's account, given in 1887, was correct, then most of the innovations credited to Cartwright were, in fact, the work of the Gothams before the Knickerbockers were formed, including a set of written rules.
[46][f] Legend holds that Cartwright also introduced the game in most of the towns where he stopped on his trek west to California to find gold, a sort of Johnny Appleseed of baseball.
[i][j] One point undisputed by historians is that the modern professional major leagues that began in the 1870s developed directly from the amateur urban clubs of the 1840s and 1850s, not from the pastures of small towns such as Cooperstown.
At a preliminary meeting [of the Knickerbockers], it was suggested that as it was apparent they would soon be driven from Murray Hill, some suitable place should be obtained in New Jersey, where their stay could be permanent; accordingly, a day or two afterwards, enough to make a game assembled at Barclay street ferry, crossed over, marched up the road, prospecting for ground on each side, until they reached the Elysian Fields, where they "settled.
With the construction of two significant baseball parks enclosed by fences in Brooklyn, enabling promoters there to charge admission to games; the prominence of Elysian Fields began to diminish.
[b] The following year, twenty-five clubs including one from New Jersey established an ongoing governing body with officers, constitution and by-laws, but the National Association of Base Ball Players is conventionally dated from the first meeting in 1857.
In a return match held August 17, 1858, and played at the Fashion Course in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, a slightly smaller crowd cheered Brooklyn to a win over New York and Hoboken by a score of 29–8.
No lover of the pastime can regret this, as the New-York mode is superior and more attractive in every way; and better calculated to perpetuate and render "our national game" an "institution" with both "young and old America.
