“Baseball” has a long history in the US, and like most things with a long history, there are plenty of myths, legends, and commonly held beliefs. For instance, you can find references to baseball being invented in 1839 by Abner Doubleday. You can also learn that baseball was invented in 1845 by Alexander Cartwright. With a little more digging you can find out that no, actually baseball evolved from an English game called “rounders.”
None of those things are true! The word “baseball” first appeared in a book called the “Little Pretty Pocket-Book”, by John Newbery in 1744. It’s in a short poem that describes a “ball once struck off, away flies the boy to the next destin’d post, and then Home with joy.” That’s not a lot to go on, but it sounds like something very much like hitting a ball then running to a series of bases is involved.
“Base-ball” was described more completely in 1748 in a letter written by Lady Hervey, who explains that schoolboys played the game in the winter in a “large room”. Then in 1755 John Kidgell wrote a book called “The Card” in which he describes it in quite a bit of detail.
The game was common enough in the 1700s and early 1800s that Jane Austen included it in “Northanger Abbey,” where it’s clear that girls played the game as well.
The first reference to baseball in North America is from, of all things, a town ordinance in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. They were worried about having the new windows in the town meeting house broken, and the ordinance forbid playing baseball within 80 yards of the place. Just to be sure, the ordinance also bans wicket, cricket, batball, football, cats, fives, “or any other games played with Ball.”
But some elements of baseball are even older. There was a game as early as the 1300s called “prisoner’s base” or just “base” — it had the bases, but the ball was either completely absent or, possibly, optional.
Baseball eventually became an “organized” game — that is, somebody wrote down the rules. The myth about Alexander Cartwright comes from some rules written by the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in 1845. Cartwright was indeed in the club, but there’s no evidence he had anything to do with the rules. He was an officer of the club, but not until well after 1845. And the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club was not even close to the first organization to publish baseball rules. In 1796, and believe it or not in Germany, a book of games “for the exercise and recreation of the body and spirit” included a set of rules for “English base-ball,” which was also termed “Ball with Free Station.”
As for baseball having evolved from “rounders,” it looks more like it was actually the reverse; “rounders” didn’t appear until 1828, by which time “baseball” had apparently been around for ages. That myth probably comes from the fact that while baseball was becoming well established in America, it was fading away in England, where “rounders” apparently took its place both as a game (apparently it’s fairly similar) and as a word; even if what they were playing was a lot like “baseball,, the word itself fell out of use in England. That makes it at least a double for “rounders,” and maybe even a home run.
