Baseball is America’s
national pastime. The exact origin and inventor of the game are
disputed, but cricket, and rounders in particular, had input into the
game’s creation. Rudimentary games of baseball and town ball were played in the United States from the late 1700s. Alexander Cartwright, in New York,
drew up the first set of rules for baseball in 1845 and a year later,
the first recorded game was played. By the time of the American Civil
War in the 1860s, the game was still primarily played in the north east
of the United States
but at the war’s end soldiers from both sides helped spread the game
throughout their local communities. Also by this time, baseball had
replaced cricket as the most popular summer game in the United States.
After the end of the war, professional baseball started to develop and
this was to be the impetus to the sport’s continued growth.
In 1866, Charles Peverelly in his book The Book of American Pastimes
made his famous observation that, “The game of baseball has now become
beyond question the leading feature of the outdoor sports of the United
States… in short, the pastime suits the people, and the people suit the
pastime.” By the end of the nineteenth century, baseball had commenced its spread across the globe being embraced in particular by Japan and the counties of Latin America. Baseball was being played in Australia by the 1880s.
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