The game evolved from the old bat and ball games that were already being played in England in the mid-18th century. This game was brought by immigrants to North America, where the modern version was developed. By the late 19th century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. Baseball is a tremendously exciting game and there is no doubt that the game as played on the field today is much better than it was 20 years ago or 40 years ago or 60 years ago, and so on.
Mills' report was almost immediately refuted by several baseball historians, but it remained the authoritative document on the creation of baseball for decades. In the Mills' report, they said that the war hero invented baseball (both the name and the sport) in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. I also know that if there were any official baseball institutions or figures that were a last option for Doubleday, it would be someone associated with the Hall of Fame, with its existence in Cooperstown based on the myth of Doubleday to begin with. Some accounts credit founding member Alexander Joy Cartwright (sometimes called “the father of baseball”) for crafting the rules for the game that would be known as modern baseball, but this has been discussed.
Baseball became a popular spectator sport in the 1920s, when Babe Ruth starred for the New York Yankees. In 1846, the Knickerbockers played the first official baseball game against a team of cricketers, ushering in a new and unique American tradition. In what I suspect was a response to that mockery, the following spring Selig announced the formation of a committee charged with studying the origins of baseball. Spalding later lobbied Graves for more information and, according to Spalding, Graves provided him with all kinds of information stating that Doubleday had invented, and even named, baseball.
You may have heard that a young man named Abner Doubleday invented the game known as baseball in Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 1839. He says the myth that Doubleday invented the baseball game actually came from a mining engineer in Colorado. The first widely accepted lie that baseball is a truly American sport revolved around Alexander Cartwright, who helped found and run the Knickerbocker Base Baseball Club in New York and who, in 1845, was credited with writing the first rules of baseball. In the midst of these contradictory claims about the origins of baseball, Major League Baseball dates back to 1876, when the National League was founded.
