http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010708/ts/baseball_history_dc.html

Sunday July 8 5:24 PM ET

New Evidence Baseball Originated Years Earlier

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two recently discovered articles dating back to 1823 may have baseball historians scrambling to alter the mythology surrounding the origins of the game, according to a report in Sunday's New York Times.

The long-standing popular myth of the birth of the U.S. national pastime is that the game was invented in 1839 by Abner Doubleday, a West Point cadet, on a dirt field in Cooperstown, New York, current site of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Historians later credited New York bank clerk Alexander Cartwright and the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club with introducing many of the game's rules and using them for the first time in a game in 1846 in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The latest clues to the genesis of the game were unearthed by a New York University librarian, according to the Times report, and show that baseball, or ``base ball,'' existed in some form years before Doubleday is credited with inventing it.

George A. Thompson discovered the articles that appeared on April 25, 1823, and demonstrated that the game was already being played in some form in Manhattan in the neighborhood that later became Greenwich Village.

The longer of the two articles discovered by Thompson appeared in The National Advocate, one of several New York newspapers of the day.

``I was last Saturday much pleased in witnessing a company of active young men playing the manly and athletic game of 'base ball' at the Retreat in Broadway (Jones'),'' the 1823 article began.

``I am informed they are an organized association, and that a very interesting game will be played on Saturday next at the above place, to commence at half past 3 o'clock, P.M.

``Any person fond of witnessing this game may avail himself of seeing it played with consummate skill and wonderful dexterity,'' the article continued.

It goes on to wonder why the game was not more popular with ''the young men of our city,'' calling it, ``an innocent amusement, and healthy exercise, attended with but little expense, and has no demoralizing tendency.''

MANLY EXERCISE

The second article, published the same day in The New-York Gazette and General Advertiser, referred to ``a communication in favor of the manly exercise of base ball.''

John Thorn, a baseball historian, found it particularly interesting that the tone of the report assumed readers knew to what it was referring.

That indicated that the game was ``not a revolutionary new product'' in 1823, Thorn told the Times.

Thorn said it adds credence to the theory that baseball evolved over time.

``It really is an uninterrupted lineage,'' Thorn said.

Another baseball historian, Mark Alvarez, told the Times, ''The exciting thing about this discovery is that it implies this game was a regular meeting, that you could go somewhere and expect people to play and you could watch.''

The 1823 article made no mention of hot dogs and beer, but the site of the game featured a tavern run by a man named William Jones.

-- (Baseball@history.when), July 08, 2001

Answers

Update: Derek Jeter makes it with Anna Kournikova.

-- (nemesis@awol.com), July 08, 2001.

Baseball is not an American Sport. It was played by Africans long before they even came to America. When whitey stole the blacks for slaves, they also stole their game and figured out how to profit from it.

-- Big Joe Black (my great great great grandaddy @ was a. superstar of African baseball), July 08, 2001.

Prove it

-- (Big Joe White@home.plate), July 08, 2001.

During the revolutionary war American soldiers took recreation time to play what they called baseball.

This appears to have been something people have played for some time before Abner was around. Though in what form, or if it was much closer to cricket in those days, who can say? I will however posit that there was no infield fly rule, or ability of batsmen to steal first on a dropped third strike, or suicide squeezes.

-- NowThatsaSappy! (sarsaparilla@og.whatasnozzle), July 09, 2001.

Some history of baseball.

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), July 09, 2001.