As I sat and watched the college world series this weekend I began to wonder about baseball and several questions came to mind: where did we get the game of baseball? Who should we give credit to for the formation of the game we see today? How has it withstood the tests of wartime? And what helped this game thrive to what it is today, the nations pastime? Baseball grew out of various ball and stick games that had been played throughout the United States during the first half of the 19th century. It was a game that was played in small towns to big cities, people of all ages played and of all social classes. Common laborers would play with bank presidents and doctors. During the Civil War both Yankee and Rebel soldiers would play this beloved pastime when fighting ceased for a while. For Americans, baseball was their game, a sport that had links to British games such as cricket and rounders but gad been adapted by colonists into their own. Nemec, (6).The most common early version was called town ball. There were no foul lines or fixed positions, and infielders had to hit the baserunner with the ball to get him/her out. In 1845 a group of local Manhattan men led by Alexander Cartwright formed the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. This group was the first to lay out foul lines on the baseball diamond and rules like three strikes to a batter. On June 19. 1846 the Knickerbockers played the first known organized baseball game in a 23 to 1 loss to the New York Base Ball Club on Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The game seemed to spread rapidly after this and in a decade there were approximately 50 teams and the New York Mercury identified baseball as the National Pastime.Alexander Cartwright was a New York bank teller in the spring of 1845 when he suggested that him and his friends organize themselves into a formal baseball club. The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club was the first of its kind and it made the childs game of...
