To most people, baseball is as American as apple pie or Independence Day. Most written records state that the first baseball game in history was played at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 19th June, 1846, between the New York Nine and the Knickerbocker Baseball Club.
In 1907 a commission established to investigate the origins of the game declared categorically that it had been invented in 1839 by an American general named Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown in upstate New York.
But evidence suggests that baseball originated much earlier — in Europe.
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Coming up: Where did baseball originally come from?
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
To most people, baseball is as American as apple pie or Independence Day. Most written records state that the first baseball game in history was played at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 19th June, 1846, between the New York Nine and the Knickerbocker Baseball Club. In 1907 a commission established to investigate the origins of the game declared categorically that it had been invented in 1839 by an American general named Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown in upstate New York.
But evidence suggests that baseball originated much earlier — in Europe.
A game called ‘base ball’ is referred to by Jane Austen in her novel Northanger Abbey, published in 1818. And a woodcut illustrating John Newbery’s English children’s book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) reveals that a ball game involving bases was being played in England even earlier in the 18th century. Many early games, in fact, involved the use of bats and balls and running between different kinds of bases. One such game became formalised as rounders, first described in detail in William Clarke’s The Boy’s Own Book, published in 1828. And in Ball, Bat and Bishop, a history of the origin of ball games, a connection between rounders and baseball is established fairly conclusively.
But it may be that rounders and baseball, as well as cricket, are all derived from a game that dates back to even earlier times. A French manuscript from 1344 contains an illustration of clerics playing a game, possibly la soule, with similarities to baseball.
It’s pretty obvious that this game was brought by immigrants to North America, where the modern version developed.
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