ABSTRACT
While the legend that a young West Point cadet, Abner Double-day, invented baseball in 1839 at Cooperstown, New York (the conclusion of a committee commissioned by the major league owners of 1905 to determine the origins of the sport) has permeated American thinking for most of this century, ample evidence indicates that it underwent a long period of development considerably earlier than that date. Despite the revisionist efforts of the committee, led by sporting-goods tycoon A1 Spalding–a product of the rampant nationalist fervor of the late nineteenth century–it appears that baseball's ancestors consisted of various stick-and-ball games played by generations of Englishmen and American colonists; e.g., “old cat” games, rounders, town ball. Printed references to “base ball” appeared as early as 1700 in America. Robin Carver, in his Book of Sports (1827), noted that Americans called their form of rounders “base Ball” because they used bases instead of stakes as in cricket.
