Now, Origins of ‘Base Ball’ Traced to 1823

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.

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 when not fighting off Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.

While that legend led to the Hall of Fame being founded in Doubleday’s hometown of Cooperstown, N.Y., more recent evidence showed that the first real game of baseball was played by two teams in Hoboken, N.J., in 1846.

But now comes George A. Thompson Jr., a New York University librarian and baseball fan who spends a lot of time trolling through old newspapers in search of interesting items that shed light on early life in New York City.

Last fall, he was poking through the pages of The National Advocate when he discovered a brief item on April 23, 1823, referring to Saturday games of “base ball” being played at the corner of Broadway and 8th Street in lower Manhattan.

“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 in an interview Sunday. He said he called the Hall of Fame, which “confirmed that it would be a very early reference.”

Even more intriguing, he says, was that the writer and the editor saw no need to explain what “base ball” was. “They took it for granted that people would understand what it was about,” suggesting that many people were already familiar with the game.