Retro Raunch Revisit

JUN 19, 1846: The first recorded baseball game is played on the Elysian Fields in Hoboken,NJ with the New York Nines Base Ball Club defeating the Knickerbocker Athletic Club 23–1. The game was an amateur contest umpired by Alexander Joy Cartwright, a member of the Knickerbockers and supposedly under his rules to which he has been referred to as 'the father of baseball'. While he is one of the games' early pioneers who is enshrined at the hallowed Hall of Fame in Cooperstown,NY, doubt & debate has been cast for decades with his role as to whether he was the sole founder and many historians have said the claim of invention is an exaggeration, and that his hand in furthering development is an embellishment. The first professional team to appear was the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869. After Cartwright in Dec 1907, baseball was then attributed to Abner Doubelday (a former Union Army General during the 1861-65 Civil War who won fame at the Battle of Gettysburg) by the Mills Commission investigating the game's origin. Inspite of him never having mentioned the game or participation in its evolution during his lifetime, Doubleday was also dubiously called the founding father but the myth was debunked in 1939 (and this rejection has seen him kept out of the HOF). It has been suggested that baseball's rules may have come from a team named the Gotham Club (pre-dating the Knickerbockers) and that the game itself was an ancestor/variation of the Britsh sport 'rounders', a similar bat & ball game with its earliest beginnings tracing back to the 1500's and first being mentioned in 1744.