Origins: Baseball's Real 19th-Century Roots
The History of American Sports
Chapter 2 · Origins: Baseball's Real 19th-Century Roots
Baseball Before the Knickerbockers: A Game Already Sixty Years Old
By the time anyone sat down to write baseball's rules on paper, some version of the game had already been played in America for well over half a century. A Princeton University student's diary from 1786 records playing "baste ball" on campus. An ordinance passed in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1791 banned the game of "baseball" from being played within 80 yards of the town's new meeting house — not because the sport was new and needed regulating for the first time, but because its windows kept getting broken. By the early 1820s, regular Saturday games were already a fixture on the outskirts of New York City, in what's now Greenwich Village.
None of these were the same game the Knickerbockers would later codify. What existed instead was a loose family of regional variants, all recognizably related but genuinely different in their particulars — "town ball" around Philadelphia, the "Massachusetts Game" in New England (which kept a distinctive plugging-the-runner rule, described below, longer than most other regional versions), and informal New York games that would eventually feed directly into the Knickerbocker Club's own membership. There was no single rulebook, no fixed number of players, and no standard field — just a shared idea of a bat, a ball, bases to run, and outs to record, worked out slightly differently in every town that played it.
September 1845: The Knickerbocker Rules, Written Down for the First Time
The New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club had already existed informally for a few years by the time it formalized itself as a club in September 1845 — and one of its very first acts was to put a version of the game's loose regional rules into a single, fixed written document, the "Laws of Base Ball," adopted on September 23, 1845. This is the moment usually pointed to as baseball's real codification: not the invention of a new game from nothing, but the first time an existing family of local games got written down as one specific, reproducible set of twenty rules.
| Provision | What the 1845 Rules Actually Said |
|---|---|
| Base distances | "Forty-two paces" from home to second, and from first to third, equidistant — roughly 89.1 feet, tantalizingly close to (but not quite) the 90 feet the game would eventually settle on |
| Strikeout | Three strikes constituted an out — already recognizably the modern rule |
| Ending a half-inning | "Three hands out, all out" — three outs per side, a genuine departure from cricket's own all-out-together model, which several earlier American variants had still followed |
| Foul territory | A ball hit outside the range of first and third base was ruled foul — an explicit foul-line concept that not every regional variant had bothered to define |
| Putting out a runner | A runner was out only if tagged with the ball, or if the ball reached the base ahead of him — not, as in some older variants, by being struck directly with a thrown ball |
That last rule is a bigger deal than it might look on paper. Several of baseball's regional ancestors — town ball especially, and the Massachusetts Game held onto it the longest — used a practice usually called "soaking" or "plugging": a fielder retired a runner by simply throwing the ball and hitting him with it directly, anywhere on his body, while he ran between bases. Outlawing that in favor of tagging or a force play wasn't a stylistic preference. It removed a real, physically painful hazard from the game and pushed it decisively toward the version recognizable today.
Alexander Cartwright's Real, Considerably Overstated Role
Popular retellings — including the short version given in this course's own opening chapter — credit Alexander Joy Cartwright with writing the 1845 Knickerbocker rules. The real documentary record tells a different story: Cartwright was not even a member of the committee that drew up the rules that year. That committee's actual, documented members were William R. Wheaton and William H. Tucker. Major League Baseball's own official historian, John Thorn, has put it bluntly — Cartwright's plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame contains "every word of substance" inaccurate, including specific claims that he personally fixed the base distances, the number of players per side, or the length of the game. Baseball historian Jeffrey Kittel goes further still, arguing that essentially none of the 1845 Knickerbocker rules were genuinely original at all — the neighboring Gotham Club, an older New York ball club, had already been playing under most of the same provisions — with the three-out half-inning possibly the one real exception.
None of this erases the Knickerbocker Club's real historical importance — the 1845 rules genuinely were the first time this particular combination of provisions got written down as one fixed document, and that document really did become the ancestor of every rulebook that followed. It just means the individual credit long attached to one club member's name belongs, on the actual record, to two entirely different people.
The First Recorded Game: June 19, 1846
The first officially recorded game played under something close to the new Knickerbocker rules took place on June 19, 1846, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey — the Knickerbockers' own regular playing ground, chosen specifically because open space on Manhattan itself was already becoming scarce. Their opponent was a team usually identified as the "New York nine," most likely drawn from the parent Gotham Club whose own earlier rules Kittel argues the Knickerbockers had largely just inherited.
Manufacturing a Myth: Albert Spalding and the Mills Commission
Henry Chadwick's 1903 rounders theory, described earlier, was a genuine, evidence-based hypothesis from a respected baseball writer. It also happened to strike one of the sport's most powerful men, Albert Spalding — a former star pitcher turned sporting-goods magnate and president of the Chicago Cubs — as an insult to the game's national character. Spalding wanted baseball established, on the record, as a purely American invention, with no debt to any English children's game whatsoever. In 1905 he organized a commission to settle the question once and for all, naming it after its chairman, National League president Abraham G. Mills — and, tellingly, staffing it with members he had personally selected to favor an American-origin conclusion, while pointedly leaving Chadwick himself off the panel entirely.
The commission solicited public letters asking for firsthand memories of baseball's early days. Most replies were vague or unhelpful — until a mining engineer named Abner Graves wrote to the Akron Beacon Journal in April 1905 with a strikingly specific claim: he said he had personally watched a man named Abner Doubleday draw a diagram of a baseball diamond in the dirt in Cooperstown, New York, around 1839, inventing the game on the spot by adding four bases and a pitcher throwing from within a six-foot ring. When Spalding pressed him for evidence, Graves produced only a diagram he claimed to have redrawn from memory, since the original had supposedly been lost and most of the players he named were already dead. Mills received the full file of testimony in October 1907 and issued his final report on December 30, 1907, formally crediting Doubleday as baseball's inventor and settling on 1839 as the exact year — even though Graves's own letters had wavered between 1839 and 1841, and Mills's report quietly added specific details, including Doubleday's supposed invention of the modern putout system, that appear nowhere in Graves's own original testimony.
Why the Doubleday Story Falls Apart on Contact
- Doubleday wasn't in Cooperstown in 1839. He was a first-year cadet at West Point, where plebes were almost never granted leave — making a trip to Cooperstown to invent a children's game close to impossible.
- Graves was five years old in 1839. He would have been recalling — with exact, specific detail — an event from more than seventy years earlier, one he supposedly witnessed as a small child.
- Graves's own reliability collapsed under scrutiny. He separately claimed to have worked for the Pony Express starting in 1852 — eight years before the Pony Express existed. Late in life, he shot and killed his wife and was committed to an asylum as insane, dying there.
- Doubleday himself never claimed any of this. Across an extensive personal correspondence and diaries, he mentioned baseball exactly once — a brief, unremarkable 1871 letter ordering sporting equipment. One of his own obituaries specifically noted that he showed no real interest in outdoor sports at all.
One historian, David Block, has offered a plausible innocent explanation rather than assuming Graves simply invented the whole story from nothing: Graves may genuinely have confused Abner Doubleday the general with one of two actual Cooperstown residents who happened to share the Doubleday surname — his cousins Abner Demas Doubleday or John Doubleday. A seventy-year-old, five-year-old's memory mixing up two men with the same last name is, at least, a more forgivable error than Spalding's own deliberate, politically motivated push to have the commission reach a predetermined conclusion.
How a Debunked Story Still Built Cooperstown
A myth this thoroughly discredited might be expected to fade quietly — instead, it left a permanent, physical mark on the sport. In 1923, the village of Cooperstown purchased the property where Doubleday supposedly drew his diagram, and a ballpark called Doubleday Field was built on the site. Around 1934, a battered old baseball found on a farm near Cooperstown, allegedly once belonging to the Graves family, was purchased by local businessman Stephen Carlton Clark, who built a small museum exhibit around it. When National League president Ford Frick suggested pairing that exhibit with a proper hall of fame for the sport, Cooperstown — already carrying the myth's own weight — was the obvious, if entirely fictional, choice of location. A 1937 state legislative committee formally declared Cooperstown "the birthplace of baseball," and the National Baseball Hall of Fame opened there in 1939, timed deliberately to mark the game's supposed hundredth anniversary.
Questions to Sit With
Henry Chadwick's rounders theory was published two years before Spalding's commission and was based on Chadwick's own firsthand childhood experience, yet it lost out to a fabricated story built on a single unreliable witness's word. What does that outcome suggest about how national myths compete against evidence, especially when a myth flatters national pride and the evidence doesn't?
The Knickerbocker rules turn out to have had little that was genuinely original in them, borrowed largely from the older Gotham Club — yet the Knickerbockers, not the Gothams, are the club history remembers. What tends to determine which group gets remembered for a real historical achievement: who did the work first, or who wrote it down and publicized it?
Cooperstown's status as baseball's spiritual home has outlived the debunked legend it was built on by nearly a century. Can you think of another place, tradition, or institution that has kept its symbolic importance even after the historical story behind it was shown to be false?
Quick Reference — Baseball's Real Origins
- Baseball-like games were already being played in America decades before 1845 — a 1786 Princeton diary entry, an 1791 Pittsfield ordinance banning the game near a meeting house, and regional variants like town ball and the Massachusetts Game
- The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club formally adopted its "Laws of Base Ball" on September 23, 1845 — 20 rules including 42-pace base distances, three strikes for an out, three outs per half-inning, defined foul territory, and tag/force outs replacing the older, painful "soaking"/plugging practice
- Those rules were actually written by committee members William R. Wheaton and William H. Tucker — Alexander Cartwright, popularly credited, was not on the 1845 committee at all, per MLB's own official historian John Thorn
- The first recorded game under the new rules was played June 19, 1846, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken — the Knickerbockers themselves lost it, 23–1
- The rival Abner Doubleday origin story was manufactured by Albert Spalding's 1905 Mills Commission, resting entirely on unreliable witness Abner Graves — Doubleday was actually a West Point cadet in 1839 and never claimed any role in inventing the game
- The debunked myth nonetheless led directly to Cooperstown becoming home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, opened in 1939 — Doubleday himself has never been inducted into it
What's Next
Next chapter: Origins: American Football's Real Evolution From Rugby — Walter Camp's specific rule changes at Yale between 1876 and 1881, and how a college rugby-football variant pulled itself decisively away from its English roots.