Where Did Baseball Come From?

There can be no debate that baseball is one of, if not the greatest game ever invented. This "national past time" of the United States, whose influence has spread to many other nations and regions around the world, is a beautiful mix of athletic feats and complex strategy-one that has consistently drawn players and entertained fans for more than 100 years. But one of the grand debates involving baseball, a debate that has been argued for more than a century now, has to do with the game's originator. There are many theories regarding this question, some better than others, so in an effort to help bring this debate to a close, in this article we will take a closer look at some of the more common arguments that have been presented through the years, and using the best and most reliable information we can find, provide a final answer to that age old question, "Who invented baseball?"

Who Invented Baseball: From Myth to Fact

There have been several myths that have circulated regarding who invented baseball, and for decades many people just assumed that it was Abner Doubleday. Nobody actually knew where this story came from exactly, and although it does appear that Mr. Doubleday was a very prominent early baseball figure, there were no concrete facts to support the notion that he was indeed the game's originator. The simple fact is that baseball had already taken hold in the United States as perhaps the most popular game in its short history, and attributing the game's invention to Abner Doubleday was just convenient-a guess that was just as good as any other.

Recent evidence, however, seems to prove that Doubleday was NOT the inventor, but rather a man named Alexander Cartwright. It was during the early part of the 19th Century that Cartwright, as a member of a group called the New York Knickerbockers-an elite group of business men-decided to devise a game that would help relieve him and his colleagues from the stress and confines of their dreary work-a-day lives and confines. The game, said Cartwright, would be played with a bat and a ball-an idea that was borrowed from the games of Cricket and English Rounders-and the name he attributed to his invention was Town Ball.

Cartwright and the Knickerbockers laid out the rules of Town Ball (rules we will outline below) and the game quickly became popular and began to spread. Most baseball historians now believe that Town Ball, a game with rules and strategy so similar to modern baseball they are hard to ignore, later evolved into the game we know and love today. Some of the rules for Town Ball included:MLB중계