Researcher Tosses Curve at Saga of Baseball’s Invention

Abner Doubleday’s “invention” of baseball at Cooperstown has already been debunked as a myth. Now it may be Alexander Cartwright’s turn.

Cartwright’s generally accepted claim to fame was challenged in a newspaper report that claimed to have found new evidence about the origins of baseball.

The New York Times, in today’s editions, said a newly discovered newspaper story and box score show that other teams were already playing baseball in New York City a year earlier than 1846, when Cartwright supposedly invented the game.

The story also reported that baseball probably evolved from a number of enthusiasts in New York in the mid-1840s, rather than springing fully formed from the imagination of anyone in particular.

The discovery was made by Edward L. Widmer, a Harvard graduate student who was doing research for his doctoral dissertation at the New-York Historical Society.

In a copy of the New York Morning News, Widmer reportedly found an account of a game on Oct. 21, 1845, between the “New York Ball Club and a team from Brooklyn.” New York won, 24-4, aided by a grand slam, or in the vocabulary of the time, “four aces” off a single hit.

Like the 1846 game that historians have credited as the first, the earlier game was played at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J., then a bucolic area easily reachable from Manhattan by ferry.

The Morning News account of the 1845 game indicates that the popularity of baseball was spreading rapidly at the time. “Two more Base clubs are already formed in our sister city,” the story said, referring to Brooklyn.

The story did not say which rules were used, an important question to specialists.

In popular myth, Doubleday invented baseball at Cooperstown in Upstate New York. Historians seeking the true progenitor have instead credited Cartwright, a New York bank clerk, who is said to have drawn up the rules and organized the first game in 1846 for the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club at Elysian Fields.