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Early History
Baseball developed from variations of the English game of rounders, from related regional and local games, and from children's games like "one old cat," all of which had evolved through centuries. The traditional story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, N.Y. has been discredited. Rather, in the 1840s Alexander Cartwright of the New York Knickerbocker Club standardized many of the features and field dimensions still in use today. It is widely thought that the first game of modern baseball was played by the Knickerbockers in the fall of 1845 in a park called Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J. Sportswriter Henry Chadwick wrote (1858) the first rule book, and though the rules continue to change by small degrees, by 1900 the game was essentially that of today.
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