1st organized baseball game

On Nov 11, 11:30 am, sli....DeleteThis@slidge.com wrote:
> > Since I got this just by typing in "base ball" to a known search of old
> > newspapers, I know this cannot be a new discovery. There are even
> > earlier hits but without as much detail on the game. What makes the 1846
> > game different from these?
>
> My understanding is that the 1846 game was the first verified game played
> using Cartwright's rules.

There are many issues here. The 1846 game is traditionally considered
"first" and has been since at least 1866, which is about when interest
in baseball history arose. The likely reason for this is that it
involved the Knickerbocker club, which was still a going concern in
1866. The 1845 games (there were two: one in Hoboken and the return
game in Brooklyn) involved organizations long gone by 1866, and so
were overlooked.

The 1845 games have been known to baseball historians since about
1980. Why the long period of their being forgotten? Before the
modern miracle of OCR you couldn't run a search on this stuff. You
had to go and look page by page, either in a library's bound volume or
on microfilm. All sorts of stuff has turned up in recent years since
significant numbers of newspapers have been scanned electronically.
This is still ongoing. This is a great period to be doing early
baseball research.

Another issue is that no informed person has ever claimed the 1846
affair was literally the first game. It was taken to be the first
"match game", i.e. between opposing clubs. The Knickerbockers club
books survive to this day (they are in the New York Public Library)
and record intra-club games from the fall of 1845.

There is little evidence to support the characterization of the game
as "Cartwright's rules". When the Knickerbockers formed, they created
a committee on by-laws which codified the rules. These rules are
often ascribed to Cartwright, but they were actually signed by William
Wheaton and William Tucker. There is reason to believe that
Cartwright was an instigator of the formation of the club, but the
tradition that he created the rules arises in the 1910s. There are
various reasons for this newer tradition (which are kind of
interesting but don't lend themselves to brief explication). As much
as anything, it served as a counter to the Abner Doubleday story,
which informed observers always pretty much knew was a crock. But the
Cartwright story is only slightly less a crock.

In an interesting twist, it isn't even clear that the 1846 game rates
as "verified". There is no question but that it took place, but there
is a theory that it wasn't actually a match game, but rather a typical
intra-club game which included some outside players (which was not
uncommon) and which was later (probably in the 1850s) reinterpreted as
the first match game. See Joel Zoss and John Bowman's book "Diamonds
in the Rough" for this theory. I don't find the argument convincing,
but this is in balance: it isn't a slam dunk either way.

> According to Wikipedia, the earliest reference to baseball is in 1791, in
> Pittsfield, MA.

The Wikipedia articles on early baseball run from decent to dreadful.
The 1791 reference is not the earliest. It is the earliest American
reference, if you are willing to overlook the earlier American
editions of an English book which mentioned it. The earliest known
reference is 1744.

Richard Hershberger
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