need some help

The one thing you can be sure of is that it WASN'T Abner Doubleday.

There are civil war diaries that mention the game ... references in court documents refer to banning "town ball" on certain days back as early as the 1830's....

I don't think the game was actually invented, just like golf wasn't invented. It evolved over time.

I found a reference to "Town Ball" with official rules dated back to 1858 (pre-civil war). Here is the link. You may want to do some research on "rounders" too.

Town Ball

Rounders Link

If you follow the link, you can see that Rounders was played back in the 1600's ... and it probably has a predessor that has been forgotten.

Try this to search on publications by keyword. I didn't have any luck with words like inventor or founder, but when I typed in 'Civil War' and 'town ball' (thanks HiHardHeat, never knew it was called that) I got lots of references to follow up on.

http://www.baseballindex.org/

HHH - just went back and did that same search on rounders - got 30 hits on that one.

As baseball has evolved (do a search on "stool ball", in the old days, it was similar to Cricket.

Here is a quote from Answers.com ...

"... and another game, Handyn and Handoute (Hands In and Hands Out), which was made illegal in 1477 by King Edward IV, who considered the game childish, and a distraction from compulsory archery practice."

You can trace the evolution, but there isn't an inventor.

To all:

If you want a great, casual, on-line read (it will take some time, because there is a lot of material there), try this blog.

John Thorn's Blog (Sports Historian)

Tons of pearls and articles scattered on the site. It's a great read if you love baseball.

Thanks for the link. HSBBW messed up your link because of the last part of his site name Was able to find it anyway in a search, interesting stuff!!

quote:

But if the ball is not caught after being struck at three times, it shall be considered a knock, and the Striker obliged to run