Textbooks once unequivocally stated that baseball was invented in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839, and provided as proof the picture of a dusty, ripped old ball pulled from an attic trunk. It turned out to be a hoax, baseball's first hidden-ball trick.
The next official version put the origin in Hoboken, N.J., in 1846. That story stood until 2001, when a librarian found two 1823 newspaper references to "base ball" games in Lower Manhattan. Then in May, a clerk walked out of a library vault in Pittsfield, Mass., waving a faded ordinance from 1791 that banned the playing of baseball within 80 yards of the big church in the town square.
Baseball history had a new king in the eternal run home.
Until the next discovery usurps Pittsfield, moving baseball's birthplace to another state or era, or both. Which raises the question: How come history can say what John Adams had for lunch on Jan. 24, 1776 (wild goose on a spit), but baseball cannot pinpoint its genesis within hundreds of years or thousands of miles?
When it comes to baseball, there is no agreement on which century the first game was played. It could have been the 18th century; it could have been the 13th century. There is some record of each.
There is no agreement on which continent baseball was invented either. Was it North America, Europe or Africa? There is some evidence for all three.Continue reading the main story
Historians know more, for sure, about games played in 776 B.C. than they do about the first time someone hit a ball back, back, back, then broke into a preening trot.
They know more about how Roman gladiators decided who would be first in line marching into the Colosseum than they do about the first time someone made up a baseball lineup, thereby entering the first arena of grandstand second-guessing.
Recent best-selling biographies have laid bare the most copious details of the American past: Adams liked a nip of hard cider before breakfast; Franklin spent an hour each day nude in his chambers with the windows open; George Washington walked four miles a night.
"With a sport like baseball, which so reveres stats and its past," the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said, "you would think that this major stat of the past would be the crown jewel to find. Baseball, after all, is the ultimate sport of figures and dates. The origin of the game is the fabulous treasure."
But as hot as the baseball birthplace trail may be, few believe the quest is heading into the final innings. Baseball history, in fact, may forevermore be unconstrained by age.
"People ask: when was the first baseball game?" said John Thorn, the baseball historian who uncovered the existence of the Pittsfield ordinance during a middle-of-the-night Internet search. "It may be an unanswerable question. That's what makes it eternally fascinating."
Tom Shieber, the curator of new media at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, said: "The answer to the question is philosophical, like an archeologist wondering when man is man. We know there were ballgames going back many centuries. There is a reference to the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock playing ball. But was it baseball as we know it? And what is that?"
Ted Spencer, the Hall of Fame's longtime curator, added another perspective.
"Did you know the Pittsfield ordinance also bans a bunch of other sports, including football?" Spencer said. "Did you know nobody cares? But they care that it mentioned baseball. I got calls from reporters all over the country. That's because baseball has a spiritual hold on the American public."
The most commonly accepted thesis is that baseball has no specific starting date or place of invention. The game, they say, evolved over time. "Sprouting like a field of dandelions in the America of the late 1700's," Thorn said. Mr. Thorn pointed to the Pittsfield ordinance as evidence that baseball was rampant in 1791. "They wouldn't have had to ban it to protect the new windows of the new meeting house if it wasn't already a nuisance to that building or others," he said.
And although proud Pittsfield officials have taken to calling their economically waning city "baseball's Garden of Eden," there is an acknowledgement that the city's time in the spotlight of baseball history may be transitory.
"The towns east of us in Massachusetts are older, and so are the towns south of us," said Dave Potts, a lifelong Pittsfield resident and local baseball historian. "I'm sure they have good records. It will just take time for someone to find a reference to baseball in those files."
Piece by piece, baseball's historical research may progress in this manner for decades, especially as more and more records become available via the Internet. Still, it does lead to the same fundamental questions: Why has baseball's earliest history been so undiscovered? Why is it that the minutiae of the lives of celebrated American pioneers are so public --Ben Franklin failed math as a 9-year-old -- but until recently, little was done to trace baseball before 1823?
"Because the daily lives of prominent leaders in the American colonies were deemed important and someone wrote the details down," Mr. Shieber, the Hall of Fame's new media curator, said. "But the games were child's play and often regarded as a wasteful use of time. They weren't documented in the same way."
Ms. Goodwin agreed that there have been stages to historical writing and research, with the first stage focusing on the conspicuous historical figures. "But since then, people have been able to recreate the more unrecorded histories, like slave history and women's history," she said. "So it's not that it is not there to be found. It takes concerted effort, in diaries and letters and writings."
David Block, a retired systems analyst and amateur baseball historian, maintained that academic scholarship into the origins of baseball had been lacking until recently.
"The research had long been dominated by myth and misconception," said Mr. Block, whose book "Baseball Before We Knew It" is to be published in January. "Look at the Abner Doubleday story in Cooperstown. It never happened."
Placing the origin of baseball in Cooperstown in 1839 was the work of a turn-of-the-century commission empowered by A.B. Spalding, the sporting goods magnate, who manipulated the commission's findings to ensure the sport had, in his words at the time, "an American dad." That became Doubleday, a Civil War officer, who was supposed to have laid out the first baseball diamond in a Cooperstown dirt field.
In the latter half of the 20th century, this tale was wholly discredited, especially because Doubleday may have never set foot in Cooperstown. But by then there was a thriving, beloved Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
The current wave of baseball researchers now focus their energy not on Cooperstown, but on debunking other myths, like the long-held belief that baseball evolved from the English game of rounders.
Mr. Block, for example, said he has evidence not only that baseball is older than rounders, but also that baseball originated in England. He cited seven references to baseball in 18th-century English documents, and he said he had found a book written in German in 1796 that refers to "English baseball."
"They give rules of the game and it starts with a pitcher serving the ball to a batter," Mr. Block said. "The batter has three tries to put the ball in play. The batter runs around something like bases. It defies reason that there isn't some linkage between baseball and the game they are describing."
The small gaggle of professional baseball historians relish each of these tidbits as they are unearthed, but some are past the point of being surprised. Inside the Hall of Fame, Mr. Spencer, the curator, pointed to a reproduction hanging on a wall. It is a drawing from Spain in 1251 of people playing a game.
"There's a bat and there's a ball," Mr. Spencer said, looking at the drawing. "It looks like two guys playing baseball to me."
Not far away is another faint reproduction of an Egyptian wall inscription: pharaohs perhaps engaged in another baseball game.
Some historians are optimistic that baseball's starting point will eventually be nailed down.
"In the last five years, we've moved the date of documented evidence back from 1846 to 1791, which is huge," Mr. Thorn, who discovered the Pittsfield ordinance, said. "And we keep finding more clues. There is the evidence that has been cited from the Plymouth Plantation. The prospect of lassoing the origin of baseball more closely is good. Just because we don't have box scores and baseball cards from a team called the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock doesn't mean baseball wasn't happening there."
Perhaps there is some link there, and finding baseball's origin will now become a popular crusade, a sister cause to Americans' recent fascination with their historical forefathers.
"I guess the searching could go in any direction," Ms. Goodwin said, "though it's hard to imagine John Adams playing baseball. But you never know."
You never know. Sort of like the baseball history version of Yogi Berra's "It ain't over till it's over."
On Page 31 of David McCullough's biography "John Adams," Adams describes in his diary his idyllic boyhood activities: "making and sailing boats" and "swimming, skating, flying kites and shooting marbles, bat and ball."
John Adams was born in 1735.
Correction: September 16, 2004, Thursday An article on Sunday about the origins of baseball misstated the middle initial of a sporting-goods entrepreneur who helped create a commission in the early 20th century to determine when and where baseball was invented. He was A.G. Spalding, not A.B.Continue reading the main story