A Short History of Baseball

The history of baseball deeply embedded in the folklore of American sports is the story of baseball's invention by a young West Point cadet, Abner Doubleday, in the summer of 1839 at the village of Cooperstown, New York. Mostly a Northern and Midwestern phenomenon, baseball fever ran highest in the New York City area, where in the 1850s, games were being played "on every available green plot within a ten-mile circuit of the city." Spearheading the baseball boom were formally organized clubs with officers, clubhouses and playing grounds. …