Baseball has been providing us with fun and
excitement for more than a hundred and fifty years. The
first game resembling baseball as we know it today was
played in Hoboken ,New Jersey, on June 19, 1846. The
New York Nine beat the New York Knickerbokers that day, 23-1.
The game was played according to rules drawn up by
Alexander J. Cartwright. A surveyer and amateur athlete.
It is a myth that Abner Doubleday1 invented baseball. It
was Alexander Cartwright, not Abner Doubleday, who
first laid out the present dimensions of the playing field
and established the basic rules of the game.
The first Professional baseball team was the Cincinnati
Red Stockings, who toured the country in 1869 and didn't
lose a game all year. Baseball began to attract so many
fans that in 1876 the National league was organized-the
same National league that still exists today.
Although the game was played in 1876 it was
recognizable as baseball-nobody would confuse it with
football or basketball-it was quite a bit different from
baseball as we know it now. For example, pitchers had to
throw underhand, the way they still do in softball;the
batter could request the pitcher to throw a "high" or "low"
pitch; it took nine balls, rather than four, for a batter to
get a base on balls; and the pitching distance was olny 45
The rules were gradually changed over the following 20
years, until by about 1900 the game was more or less the
same as it is today. In 1884, the pitchers were permitted
to throw overhand; in 1887, the batter was no longer
allowed to request a "high"or "low" pitch; by 1889,it took
only four balls to get a batter to a base on balls;
the pitching distance was legthened to sixty-
And since that day in 1846 There have been
many greats to make up the game baseball such as Ty
Cobb who was born in a small town in Georgia in 1886. He
threw...