Where Did Baseball Come From?

Baseball has questionable beginnings. Many say that the game derives from the English game rounders, which was played in the early 19th century under the name of townball, goal ball, fletch-catch, baseball or just base. Each group of players had their own rules, which made organized play difficult.

Many countries around the world have had various stick and ball games. In the Americas, the natives played various games grouped as stick ball. In England, rounders and cricket have been popular. Germans played Schlagball and Russians played lapta, while the Romanians played oina.

Alexander Joy Cartwright wrote the first official rules for baseball in 1845. These rules laid out how the field would be set up and how the game would be played. These rules, referred to as the Knickerbocker Rules, were for Cartwright's New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, but were widely adopted.

In 1845 Cartwright moved his Knickerbocker team to Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. Manhattan had a lack of soft ground for the field. Over the next several years, many New York teams started playing at Elysian Fields.

On June 19th, 1846 the Knickerbockers played the first recorded baseball game against the New York Baseball Club. The New York Nine won that game 23 to 1. While the Knickerbockers were annihilated in the game, most of the New York Nine was made up of Knickerbockers who didn't want to travel to Hoboken for practice. The Cincinnati Red Stockings was the first baseball team to openly pay players, making it the first professional team, in 1869.

The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, formed in 1871, was the first professional baseball league. This league replaced the the National Association of Base Ball Players, which standardized the Knickerbocker Rules in 1857 but ran no games. The first major league, the National League, was formed in 1876. The National League is the oldest professional team sports league still in existence. In 1901, the American League was formed. In 1903, the top teams from both leagues met for the first World Series and except for 1904 and the strike of 1994, have met every year since.