According to legend, baseball was invented on June 12, 1839 by Abner Doubleday. One problem was that Doubleday was busy with his studies at West Point in 1839. Doubleday went on the participate in the Civil War where he was at Fort Sumter when it was bombarded. He rose to generalship in the war and probably witnessed soldiers playing his game. He would not have smiled and thought “I invented that”. So who did? We’ll never know. Most likely the game evolved from a children’s game called “rounders”. The earliest reference to a ball and bat game appears in a children’s book entitled “A Little Poetry Pocket Book” by John Newbery. An illustration shows a triangular field of posts, instead of bases. The poem calls the game “base-ball”. Rounders was brought to America where it became especially popular in the rising cities of the 19th Century. In 1845, the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club was formed to organize the sport. Alexander Cartwright codified the rules. The game would be played on a diamond. Three strikes and you were out. 9 balls resulted in a walk. Pitching was underhand. You were out if the ball was caught on the first bounce. Significantly, “soaking” or “plugging” (getting a player out by hitting him with the ball) was forbidden. This allowed for a harder ball, which improved the game. In 1857, the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed to organize the sport. It determined that the based would be 90’ apart and there would be 9 men and 9 innings. The game caught on and was popular by the time of the Civil War. In 1907, sporting goods magnate A.J. Spalding was determined to end the debate about the origin of the game. The British claimed the sport came from rounders, but Spalding insisted it originated in America. He set up a commission to investigate the subject and made sure it reached the conclusion he favored. An Abner Graves claimed that he witnessed Doubleday inventing the game in Cooperstown, N.Y. He had no corroboration, but his word was good enough for the commission. Doubleday would have been surprised, but he had died fifteen years earlier.
https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-baseball
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_baseball
http://www.19cbaseball.com/rules.html
0 Comments