Strike one for baseball history legend

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, July 8, 2001

By Richard Pyle

Associated Press

NEW YORK — The quest to nail down the origins of baseball has been thrown a curve with the discovery of two newspaper articles showing the game was played earlier than historians thought.

The articles appeared on April 25, 1823, and show that an organized form of a game called "base ball" was being played in Manhattan, in what is today Greenwich Village.

The articles were discovered by George Thompson Jr., a librarian at New York University. Historians have long wrestled with the task of discovering the true origins of the game — and whether it was invented or simply evolved.

For decades, the widely accepted version was that Maj. Gen. Abner Doubleday dreamed up the game in 1839 while a cadet at West Point, and later encouraged it among his Union troops during the Civil War.

That legend led to the founding of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Doubleday’s home town of Cooperstown, N.Y., although later evidence pointed to the first real game being played in Hoboken, N.J., in 1846.

Last fall, Thompson was poking through the pages of the long-forgotten National Advocate when he discovered a brief item from 1823 referring to Saturday games of "base ball" at Broadway and Eighth Street in lower Manhattan.

The writer, calling himself "A Spectator," was "much pleased in witnessing a company of active young men playing the manly and athletic game" and said another contest was to be held on the same field a week later.

The same day, the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser carried a one-paragraph item saying it had "received a communication in favor of the manly exercise of base ball," presumably from the same "Spectator."

"When I found the item, I was struck by the fact that the game was actually called ‘base ball,’ and that it had to be a very early reference, if not the earliest," Thompson said Sunday.

The newspapers saw no need to explain what "base ball" was, Thompson noted, suggesting that many people were already familiar with the game.

"They took it for granted that people would understand what it was about," he said.

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