The History of Baseball

The History of Baseball

Americans began playing baseball on informal teams, using local rules, in the early 1800s. By the 1860s, the sport, unrivaled in popularity, was being described as America's "national pastime." Alexander Joy Cartwright of New York invented the modern baseball field in 1845. Alexander Cartwright and the members of his New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club devised the first rules and regulations for the modern game of baseball.

Baseball was based on the English game of rounders. Rounders becomes popular in the United States in the early 19th century, where the game was called "townball", "base", or "baseball". Cartwright formalized the modern rules of baseball. The first recorded baseball game in 1846 when Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbockers lost to the New York Baseball Club. The game was held at the Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1858, the National Association of Base Ball Players, the first organized baseball league was formed.

People used to think that Abner Doubleday invented baseball but, historians proved them wrong because he was at war at the time when baseball was invented. So in the study in 1905 people really believed that he invented it because some man said that while he was growing up with Doubleday he remembers hitting a ball with a bat, then running to bags with sand in them. Sometime later, an old, rotting baseball found among Doubleday’s personal effects. This was viewed, as proof of that man’s story was true. Today, the very same ball is on display at the baseball hall of fame in Cooperstown.

In the early ninetieth century the Americans hated the English. There were still a few veterans of the Revolutionary War around. If the Englishmen liked to play games, the Americans would not play at all.