baseball: Early History

Stick-and-ball games were in existence as far back as ancient Egypt. However, modern baseball developed from variations of the English game of rounders, from related regional and local games, and from children's games like “one old cat,” all of which had evolved through centuries. The traditional story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, N.Y., has been discredited. Rather, in the 1840s and 50s members of the New York Knickerbocker Club standardized some of the features still in use today, modifying rules used by older clubs to codify fundamental rules for the game. It is widely thought that the first game of modern baseball was played by the Knickerbockers in the fall of 1845 in a park called Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J. In 1857 the Knickerbockers' Daniel L. “Doc” Adams presided at a convention during which the modern standards regarding the number of players and innings and the dimensions of the infield were adopted; the Knickerbockers' Louis Wadsworth also was an influential presence at the convention. Sportswriter Henry Chadwick edited (1860–81) the first published guide to the game, and though the rules continue to change by small degrees, by 1900 the game was essentially that of today.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Amateur and International Baseball
• Expansion and Labor Conflict
• Integration of Professional Baseball
• The Golden Years
• The Development of Professional Baseball in the United States
• Early History
• Basic Rules
• Bibliography

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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