HoraceClarke66: No, it didn't start in a cornfield

From the tear-stained desk of HoraceClarke66... 

 Just to riff off El Duque’s excellent skewering of Fox Sports’ fake nostalgia broadcast—baseball in a cornfield!—it’s time once and for all to put paid to the idea that baseball, baseball as we know it, has pastoral roots.

 Chasing exactly when and where people started playing bat-and-ball games is a fool’s errand. It probably started somewhere around the time we first moved out on the savannah and left behind our previously favored pastimes, swinging from trees and not being eaten.

 Ancient hieroglyphics depict Egyptians with bats playing at something called seker-hemat, around 2500 B.C. Berbers in the 1930s were observed playing ta kurt om el mahag, or “the ball of the pilgrim’s mother”—a game one historian theorized was brought to North Africa in the fifth century A.D. by the Vandals. Medieval Normans played grande théque, while their French cousins played la balle empoisonee, or “poisoned ball,” the Germans had schlagball, and the Finns played pesapällo.

 Countless other bat-and-ball games were played under different rules and different names in England. The whole welter of English and continental games followed the colonists over to America. Hired Polish laborers were playing “long ball” in the Jamestown settlement by 1609.

 I’m not making this up.

 Nor was baseball invented one day by Abner Doubleday along the banks of the Glimmerglass. Doubleday, sort of the Forrest Gump of the 19^th century, had an amazing life—but he did not invent baseball.

 Abner’s best friend for 20 years was the president of the National League…but he even he admitted that Doubleday never so much as spoke of baseball (“Hey, you know that sport you run?  Well—”).

 Doubleday himself wrote that, “In my outdoor sports, I was addicted to”—drum roll, please—“topographical work…”

 No, baseball as we know it was invented by these guys, the o.g. New York Knickerbockers. 

  While they may look like a bunch of Mennonites on a picnic, they were mostly Manhattan “merchants, lawyers, Union Bank clerks, insurance clerks and others who were at liberty after 3 o’clock in the afternoon.”

 As anyone who knows anything about the expanses of American agriculture can tell you, it would’ve been damned hard to get 18 guys together regularly for a game. In the U.S., instead, the roots of the modern game were urban.

 In the New York area, it was played on vacant lots and the remaining swathes of grass to be found anywhere in the city. Or at the Elysian Fields, a sort of 19^th-century amusement park over in Hoboken.

 The Knickerbockers, contrary to some accounts, were far from the first New York baseball club, but they were the great consolidators of what became known as “the Knickerbocker Rules,” the heart of “the New York Game”—or modern baseball.

 This was thanks mainly to the guy in the first row, middle, with the James Harden beard and the cigar. Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, graduate of Yale and of Harvard Medical School, would do more than any other single individual to invent the game we love.

 Doc played everywhere on the field save for pitcher—No curveball? But then there weren’t curveballs yet—and personally invented the position of shortstop.

 As secretary of the Knickerbocker Club and a player well into his 40s, Adams also invented the relay throw, horsehide baseballs, and the called strike. He also pushed through 9 men on a team and 9 innings in a game, secured bases set 90 feet apart, the pitcher’s mound in the middle of the diamond, and “the fly-game,” in which you had to catch a ball in the air to get an out, instead of being able to catch it on the first bounce.

 And none of it had anything to do with cornfields, or Iowa.

 To Doc Adams, the fly guy who invented the fly game, right here in New York City!