The Origin of Baseball: From Children’s Games to America’s Pastime

On December 30, 1907, a historic ruling came down in American baseball circles. A special committee officially declared that baseball had been invented in 1839 by U.S. Army officer Abner Doubleday on a pasture in Cooperstown, New York. This report appeared in American textbooks for decades, and a Baseball Hall of Fame bearing his name was erected in Cooperstown.

There was just one problem. Doubleday was enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1839, and his family had already left Cooperstown by then. More tellingly, the vast letters and diaries Doubleday left behind contain almost no mention of baseball. The single instance where he referenced the game was in 1871, in a brief note requesting an equipment order.^[1]

The origins of baseball are not the invention of any one person. It is a sport that took shape gradually over centuries — through children’s games played on both sides of the Atlantic slowly acquiring rules, forming clubs, and competing against one another.

The First Recorded Use of the Word “Baseball”

The name itself was first documented not in America but in England. In 1744, British children’s publisher John Newbery included a poem titled “Base-Ball” in his children’s book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. The illustration depicts a child holding a stick alongside three posts in the ground.^[2] This is the earliest known printed appearance of the word “baseball.”

Another document recorded the same year is the diary of a tutor to the British royal household. It notes that Prince George of Wales — later King George III — enjoyed playing “base ball” with his brothers.^[2] In other words, a game resembling baseball was already established as a leisure activity among upper-class British children in the eighteenth century.

English Bat-and-Ball Games: Rounders, Stoolball, and Cricket

To understand where baseball came from, we must look at the English tradition of bat-and-ball games. The oldest is Stoolball. The earliest documentary record appears in a 1330 poem by William Pagula, who advised clergymen to prohibit stoolball in churchyards.^[3] In stoolball, a pitcher throws a ball toward a stool or wooden post, and the batter tries to deflect it — a game regarded as a common ancestor of both cricket and baseball.

Rounders has an even more direct connection. Its structure — teams scoring by hitting a ball and circling four bases arranged in a diamond — is strikingly similar to modern baseball. It was first documented in England in 1828 and spread in various forms across Ireland and British colonies.^[3]

Historian David Block, in his book Baseball Before We Knew It, argues that rounders and early American baseball were regional variants that influenced each other. Rather than one deriving from the other, both more likely branched from common English folk games such as stoolball and “tut-ball.”^[3] This debate remains unresolved to this day.

The Doubleday Myth: How It Was Created

In 1905, American baseball magnate Albert Spalding sought to counter the claim that baseball derived from the English game of rounders and prove that baseball was a purely American invention. To this end, the Mills Commission was formed and spent several years gathering evidence.^[1]

The key testimony the commission received was a letter from mining engineer Abner Graves. Graves claimed that as a child in Cooperstown, Doubleday had drawn a diamond on a meadow, established the rules, and taught him baseball. On the basis of this testimony, the commission declared Doubleday the inventor of baseball.^[1]

But Graves’s credibility was seriously compromised. He later shot and killed his wife and was committed to a criminal psychiatric institution.^[1] Doubleday himself never once claimed to have invented baseball before his death in 1893. Modern baseball historians regard this myth as fiction.

So why did the myth persist for so long? Because when the Baseball Hall of Fame was established in Cooperstown in 1939, the Doubleday myth served as its official foundation. Once a story becomes institutionalized, it hardens regardless of the facts. Cooperstown flourished as a tourist destination, and stakeholders had every incentive to preserve the myth.

The Knickerbocker Club and the Cartwright Myth

The figure who stepped into the vacancy left by the collapse of the Doubleday myth was Alexander Cartwright. In 1953, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution officially recognizing Cartwright as the inventor of baseball, and a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame honors him as “the father of modern baseball.”

Cartwright’s real contributions are not in dispute. In 1845 he participated in founding the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, and that same year the Knickerbocker Rules were established. These rules introduced the diamond-shaped field, three outs per half-inning, and the elimination of “soaking” — putting a runner out by hitting him with the ball.^[4]

However, MLB’s official historian John Thorn directly refutes the plaque’s claims. “There is not a single factual statement on Cartwright’s plaque. He did not set the bases at 90 feet apart, teams at nine players, or games at nine innings. All three of those were decided at the 1857 convention of club owners — eight years after Cartwright had left New York.”^[4]

The prevailing view among today’s historians is that the actual authors of the Knickerbocker Rules were club president Daniel Adams and William Wheaton rather than Cartwright. Moreover, even before the Knickerbocker Club codified its rules in 1845, the Gotham Club already existed in New York, and Wheaton had already written rules for the Gotham Club back in 1837.^[4]

The Evolution of the Rules: How Baseball Became Baseball

The creation of the Knickerbocker Rules in 1845 did not instantly produce the game we know today. Over the following decades, the rules changed nearly every year, and through this process the defining characteristics of modern baseball were established one by one.

In early baseball, a batter could be put out by catching the ball, throwing it to a base, or hitting the running batter directly with the ball — a practice called “soaking.” This last method was first abolished by the 1845 Knickerbocker Rules. In 1846, the first officially recorded match was played at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the Knickerbocker team was routed by the New York team 1–23.^[5]

The development of the strike rule was long and complicated. In the early days, batters could request that pitches be thrown to their preferred location, and umpires waited considerable time before ordering batters to swing. The concept of a “swinging strike” emerged at the First Base Ball Convention in 1858, when a “called strike” proposal put forward by Knickerbocker Club member Daniel Adams was adopted.^[5] Three strikes for an out, the four-ball walk, the infield fly rule, and the treatment of foul balls as strikes were all introduced incrementally during the second half of the nineteenth century.

The pitching delivery also changed dramatically. Early baseball required the ball to be rolled underhand, like in bowling; progressively higher releases were permitted over time, and overhand pitching was not fully legalized until 1884.^[5] The distance between bases (90 feet), the nine-inning format, and nine-man teams were all standardized in 1857.

The Birth of Professional Baseball: The Cincinnati Red Stockings

As the rules settled, baseball clubs multiplied rapidly, and intensifying competition fueled the desire to hire the best players available. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first fully professional baseball team in history. All ten players on the roster, including George Wright, were paid a salary.^[6]

The Red Stockings’ first season was the stuff of legend. In 1869 they went 57 wins and 0 losses (64–0 including road games).^[6] Their unbeaten run became a nationwide sensation, and baseball transformed from an amateur hobby of local clubs into a spectacle followed by an entire nation.

In 1871, the first professional baseball league — the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players — was launched.^[6] However, it was dissolved within five years due to game-fixing scandals, excessive drinking, and an erratic schedule. In 1876, the National League was founded, adopting a stricter model of club management. This is the direct predecessor of today’s MLB (Major League Baseball).

How Baseball Spread to the World

Baseball spread beyond American borders through two main channels: U.S. military personnel and sailors who carried it with them, and locals who had studied in the United States and brought it home.

Japan received baseball in 1872, when Horace Wilson, an American teacher working in Tokyo, introduced the game to his students. Japan did not merely adopt baseball. During the Meiji era in the late nineteenth century, Japanese society linked baseball’s values of collective discipline, training, and sacrifice to the spirit of bushido.^[7] The first baseball team, the Shimbashi Athletic Club, was founded in 1878, and today Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) is recognized alongside MLB as one of the highest levels of the sport in the world.

Cuba received baseball from American sailors in the 1860s. But the way baseball took root in Cuba carried a distinct social dimension: under Spanish colonial rule, Cubans rejected the Spanish tradition of bullfighting and embraced baseball instead. The game became an expression of anti-colonial identity.^[7] In the early twentieth century, Cuban players made their way into American leagues, and Cuba became the heart of Caribbean baseball.

The Dominican Republic received baseball in the 1870s, brought by Cuban sugar planters. Today the Dominican Republic has the highest per-capita production of MLB players in the world.^[7] As of 2024, approximately 11% of all MLB players are from the Dominican Republic, and players from Latin America as a whole account for roughly 30% of the total.

There are also cases where the United States deliberately used baseball as a diplomatic tool. The 1934 tour of Japan by a team of Major Leaguers that included Babe Ruth was one facet of the diplomatic relationship between the two countries at the time.^[7] Yet wherever baseball took cultural root, it went on to develop an independent baseball culture that outlasted direct American influence.

The Dual Nature of the “America’s Pastime” Myth

The phrase “America’s pastime” — describing baseball as the national sport of America — became established in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The expression contains a striking paradox.

As we have seen, the myth that baseball is a “purely American invention” is not accurate. It evolved from English folk games, and the identity of who actually wrote the rules remains murky. Yet it is undeniable that nineteenth-century Americans took this game, organized it, refined its rules, built professional leagues, constructed ballparks, and created star players.

More complex still is the fact that the phrase “America’s pastime” did not in practice apply to everyone within America. Throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Major League Baseball maintained racial segregation. Black players were forced to compete in the separate Negro Leagues. Until Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, baseball was a pastime for white Americans only.^[8]

The Negro Leagues were far from a minor-league enterprise. Historians assess that players like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell were in no way inferior in ability to their Major League counterparts. In 2020, MLB belatedly granted the Negro Leagues official Major League status.^[8]

Why Myths Outlive the Facts

The Doubleday myth, the Cartwright myth, and the claim that baseball is “a purely American invention” have all been refuted by the historical record. Yet these myths have proven remarkably durable. The Hall of Fame still stands in Cooperstown. Cartwright’s plaque remains on display, unchanged.

This is not a problem unique to baseball. The history of sports is often entangled with ethnic identity, national pride, and commercial interests. The moment one acknowledges that English rounders and American baseball are “siblings,” the symbolic value of baseball shifts. The Mills Commission did not adjudicate the history of a sport — it manufactured a history to meet the demands of national sentiment.

What is more interesting about baseball’s actual origins than any specific inventor is the process of invention itself. A game in which English children hit a ball with a stick crossed the Atlantic, was codified in urban clubs, organized into professional leagues, and spread across the world — blending with the culture of each place it reached. Baseball was not created by one person; it was evolved by countless people together. That story is far more characteristic of baseball than any meadow in Doubleday’s day.