Who Really Invented Baseball?

Who Really Invented Baseball

You may have heard the charming tale of how war hero Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York. Unfortunately, that’s a bit of a myth. The true story of who invented baseball is a little more convoluted and a tad less romantic.

Who Really Invented Baseball

Baseball likely had its origins in the early 1800s, possibly as a mash-up of a variety of different stickandball games that had been around for centuries. These proto-baseball games included England’s cricket or rounders and even games played in ancient Egypt, by Mayan tribes, or in France, although the England story is the most plausible.

Some semblance of what baseball would become can be traced to 1800s New York as groups of men started crafting their own sets of rules. The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York gets the credit for the first true effort, with a group of men on the rules committee outlining a 20-rule parameter, dubbed the Knickerbocker Rules, which set foul lines, the paces between bases, the limit of three outs, and, (in a safety-first mentality, no doubt) eliminated the dodgeball-style rule that to get a runner out you could hit him with a thrown ball. (The legions of players that came after can thank those men in New York for that rule.) In June 1846 these rules were used in a game between the Knickerbockers and cricket’s New York Nines, which is credited as the first official game of baseball.

A key member of the early Knickerbocker club was medical doctor Daniel (“Doc”) Adams, who soon took over as club president. He championed the fledgling game, from finding equipment to forming new teams. In 1857 Adams expanded on the Knickerbocker Rules and created a more formal version, known as the Laws of Base Ball during the first convention of all baseball players. While Adams often gets the “Father of Baseball” moniker because of his early influence, no one person invented the game. The game’s formation was a communal effort, thanks in large part to the members of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York.