Baseball StoryBaseball has been providing us with fun and excitement for more than a hundred
and fifty years. The first game resembling baseball as we know it today was
played in Hoboken ,New Jersey, on June 19, 1846. The New York Nine beat the New
York Knickerbokers that day, 23-1. The game was played according to rules drawn
up by Alexander J. Cartwright. A surveyer and amateur athlete. It is a myth that
Abner Doubleday1 invented baseball. It was Alexander Cartwright, not Abner
Doubleday, who first laid out the present dimensions of the playing field and
established the basic rules of the game. The first Professional baseball team
was the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who toured the country in 1869 and didn’t lose
a game all year. Baseball began to attract so many fans that in 1876 the
National league was organized-the same National league that still exists today.
Although the game was played in 1876 it was recognizable as baseball-nobody
would confuse it with football or basketball-it was quite a bit different from
baseball as we know it now. For example, pitchers had to throw underhand, the
way they still do in softball;the batter could request the pitcher to throw a
“high” or “low” pitch; it took nine balls, rather than four,
for a batter to get a base on balls; and the pitching distance was olny 45 feet
to home plate. The rules were gradually changed over the following 20 years,
until by about 1900 the game was more or less the same as it is today.
