We can’t go on and talk about the famous 1919 World Series without discovering a little bit about the invention of baseball. Now, baseball’s invention is not really like the invention of, say, the light bulb or the automobile. But it still is a great thing, a great invention, and it had to come into existence somehow, so let’s talk about it.

Baseball is really an evolution. By “evolution” I mean that it transformed from something else to become the baseball that we know and love today. Baseball is thought to come from something called Rounders, a game played in England. Rounders became a game called Town Ball, played mostly around Boston. These two games were similar to baseball but not exact.

The exact origins of today’s baseball are a little muddy. In 1905 baseball formed the Mills Commission to discover the roots of the game. They studied the subject for three years. They give much of the credit of the modern game to a military man, Abner Doubleday. You can see a picture of old Abner down below. He was said to have fired a shot a Fort Sumter, the start of the Civil War! We’ll go into that in a month down the road. The Mills Commission decided that Doubleday changed the game enough, with rules like limiting the amount of players and defining the shape of the field, to give him credit for the modern game. They mark the date and place as 1839 in Cooperstown, NY. The Baseball Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown! You can visit it. There was even an old baseball discovered right by Cooperstown in a farmhouse. This discovery backs up the invention by Doubleday.