What is the history of baseball?

Question

were it started and when it began

Answer 1

Wow, thatniceguy gave a really long answer. Here's a better answer. Visit Cooperstown and The National Baseball Hall of Fame. It will give you all the history you want to know and it is a great trip and a fun cozy town. I've been there twice and I would go back again and again. Baseball is a great game!!

Answer 2

There are several variations but this is the Irish link. The Irish Gaelic Athletic Association permitted three types of games, Gaelic Football, Hurling and Rounders. During the exodus from Ireland during the Great Famine, 1840's, many took up residence in the US and played Rounders............ At least that is what is claimed by the GAA in Ireland...............

Answer 3

Surprisingly little is known about the origin of baseball. The question has been the subject of considerable debate and controversy for more than 100 years. Baseball (and softball), as well as the other modern bat, ball and running games, cricket and rounders, developed from earlier folk games.

Many of the earlier games were similar to each other, but there certainly were local, regional and national variations, both in how they were played and what they were called: names included "stoolball", "poison ball", and "goal ball". Few details of how the modern games developed from earlier folk games are known. Some think that various folk games resulted in a game called town ball, from which baseball was eventually born.

[edit] Early baseball
A game called "base-ball" had developed in England by the early 18th century, and it continued to be called "baseball" until after 1800. It was mentioned in a book published in 1744 called Little Pretty Pocket-Book. As is the case with all folk games, there were many variations. Similar games were played in America well before 1800.

Rules for "baseball" appeared in 1796, in a German book by Johann Guts Muths, who called the game "English base-ball". In the game described by Guts Muths, the number of bases varied with the number of players, and a single out retired the entire side.

In Northanger Abbey (written 1798), Jane Austen wrote (emphasis added): (Catherine) should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the age of fourteen, to books.

In 2004, historian John Thorn discovered a reference to a 1791 bylaw prohibiting anyone from playing "baseball" within 80 yards of the new meeting house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A librarian found the actual by-law in the Berkshire Athenaeum library, and its age was verified by researchers at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center.

If authentic and if actually referring to a recognizable version of the modern game, the 1791 document, would be, as of 2004, the earliest known reference to the game in America.


[edit] Did Abner Doubleday invent baseball?
That Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 was once widely promoted and widely believed, but there was and is no evidence but the testimony of one man decades after the fact, and there is counter-evidence. The eminent Doubleday left many letters and papers, including no description of baseball or suggestion that he considered himself a prominent person in the history of the game. An encyclopedia article about Doubleday published in 1911 makes no mention of the game.

The legend of Doubleday’s invention of baseball was itself baseball's invention, in a sense that of Al Spalding, a former star pitcher, then club executive, who had become the leading American sporting goods entrepreneur and sports publisher. Debate on baseball origins had raged for decades, heating up in the first years of the 20th century. To end argument, speculation and innuendo, Spalding organized a panel in 1905. The panelists were his friend Abraham G. Mills, a former National League president; two United States Senators, ex-NL president Morgan Bulkeley and ex-Washington club president Arthur Gorman; ex-NL president and lifelong secretary-treasurer Nick Young; two other star players turned sporting goods entrepreneurs (George Wright and Alfred Reach); and AAU president James E. Sullivan.[1]

The final report published in 1908 included three sections: a summary of the panel’s findings written by Mills, a letter by John M. Ward supporting the panel, and a dissenting opinion by Henry Chadwick. The research methods were, at best, dubious. The Mills Commission probably looked for and found the perfect story: baseball was invented in a quaint rural town without foreigners or industry, by a young man who later graduated from West Point and served heroically in the Mexican-American War, Civil War, and U.S. wars against Indians.

The Mills Commission concluded that baseball had been invented by Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839; that Doubleday had invented the word baseball(?), designed the diamond, indicated fielder positions, written down the rules and the field regulations. However, no written records from 1839 or the 1840s have ever been found to corroborate these claims; nor could Doubleday be interviewed for he died in 1893. The principal source for the story was a letter from elderly Abner Graves, a five-year-old resident of Cooperstown in 1839. But Graves never mentioned a diamond, positions or the writing of rules. Graves' reliability as a witness has also been questioned because he was later convicted of murdering his wife and spent his final days in an asylum for the criminally insane. Further, Doubleday was not in Cooperstown in 1839. He was enrolled in West Point and there is no record of any leave time. Mills, a lifelong friend of Doubleday, had never heard him mention inventing baseball.

As noted previously, versions of baseball rules have since been found in publications that significantly predate the alleged invention in 1839.

Jeff Idelson of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York has stated, "Baseball wasn't really born anywhere," meaning that the evolution of the game was long and continuous and has no clear, identifiable single origin.


[edit] 1845 / The Knickerbocker Rules
The first published rules of baseball were written in 1845 for a New York (Manhattan) base ball club called the Knickerbockers. The author, Alexander Joy Cartwright, is one person commonly known as "the father of baseball". Evolution from so-called "Knickerbocker Rules" to the current rules is fairly well documented.

The role of Cartwright himself is disputed; his authorship is sometimes called a significant exaggeration, a modern attempt to identify a single "inventor" of the game, thereby akin to the Doubleday myth. He was at least secretary for a group effort. One point undisputed by historians is the direct evolution from amateur urban clubs of the 1840s and 1850s, not the pastures of the small Cooperstowns of America, to the modern professional major leagues that began in the 1870s.


[edit] Before 1845
Evolution of the game that became modern baseball is unknown before 1845. The Knickerbocker Rules describe a game that they had been playing for some time. But how long is uncertain and so is how that game had developed.

There were once two camps. One, mostly English, asserted that baseball evolved from a game of English origin (probably rounders); the other, almost entirely American, said that baseball was an American invention (perhaps derived from the game of one ol' cat). Apparently they saw their positions as mutually exclusive. Some of their points seem more national loyalty than evidence: Americans tended to reject any suggestion that baseball evolved from an English game, while some English observers concluded that baseball was little more than their rounders without the round.


[edit] Cricket and Rounders
That baseball is based on English and Gaelic games such as cat, cricket, and rounders is difficult to dispute. On the other hand, baseball has many elements that are uniquely American.

Certainly baseball is related to cricket and rounders, but exactly how, or how closely, has not been established. Modern cricket is much older than modern baseball.

People have been playing games with balls or bats or bases for millennia, probably, and playing games with two of those elements for centuries before the Knickerbockers, certainly. Games played with bat-and-ball together may all be distant cousins; the same goes for base-and-ball games. Bat, base, and ball games for two teams that alternate in and out, such as baseball, cricket, and rounders, are likely to be close cousins. They all involve throwing a ball to a batsman who attempts to "bat" it away and run safely to a base, while the opponent tries to put the batter-runner out when liable ("liable to be put out" is the baseball term for unsafe).


[edit] After 1845
In 1857, sixteen clubs from modern New York City sent delegates to a convention that standardized the rules, essentially by agreeing to revise the Knickerbocker rules. In 1858, twenty-five including one from New Jersey founded a going concern but the National Association of Base Ball Players is conventionally dated from 1857. It governed through 1870 but it scheduled and sanctioned no games.

By 1862 some NABBP member clubs offered games to the general public in enclosed ballparks with admission fees.

During and after the American Civil War, the movements of soldiers and exchanges of prisoners helped spread the game. As of the December 1865 meeting, the year the war ended, there were isolated Association members in Fort Leavenworth (Kansas), St. Louis, Louisville, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, along with about 90 members north and east of Washington.

In 1869 the first openly professional baseball team formed. Earlier players were nominally amateurs. The Cincinnati Red Stockings recruited nationally and effectively, toured nationally, and no one beat them until June 1870.

Already in the 19th century, the "old game" was invoked for special exhibitions such as reunions and anniversaries — and for making moral points. Today hundreds of clubs in the U.S. play "vintage base ball" according to the 1845, 1858, or later rules (up to about 1887), usually in vintage uniforms. Some of them have supporting casts that recreate period dress and manner, especially those associated with living history museums.