<P> The history of baseball in the United States can be traced to the 19th century, when amateurs played a baseball - like game by their own informal rules using homemade equipment . The popularity of the sport inspired the semi-pro national baseball clubs in the 1860s . </P> <P> The earliest known mention of baseball in the U.S was a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts ordinance banning the playing of the game within 80 yards (73 m) of the town meeting house . In 1903, the British sportswriter Henry Chadwick published an article speculating that baseball derived from a British game called rounders, which Chadwick had played as a boy in England . But baseball executive Albert Spalding disagreed . Baseball, said Spalding, was fundamentally an American sport and began on American soil . To settle the matter, the two men appointed a commission, headed by Abraham Mills, the fourth president of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs . The commission, which also included six other sports executives, labored for three years, after which it declared that Abner Doubleday invented the national pastime . This would have been a surprise to Doubleday . The late Civil War hero "never knew that he had invented baseball". (But) 15 years (after his death), he was anointed as the father of the game ", writes baseball historian John Thorn . The myth about Doubleday inventing the game of baseball actually came from a Colorado mining engineer . Another early reference reports that base ball was regularly played on Saturdays in 1823 on the outskirts of New York City in an area that today is Greenwich Village . </P> <P> The first team to play baseball under modern rules was long believed to be the New York Knickerbockers . The club was founded on September 23, 1845, as a social club for the upper middle classes of New York City, and was strictly amateur until it disbanded . The club's by - laws committee, which included William R. Wheaton and William H. Tucker, formulated the Knickerbocker Rules, which in large part dealt with organizational matters but which also laid out rules for playing the game . One of the significant rules prohibited soaking or plugging the runner; under older rules, a fielder could put a runner out by hitting the runner with the thrown ball, similarly to the common schoolyard game of kickball . The Knickerbocker Rules required fielders to tag or force the runner, as is done today, and avoided a lot of the arguments and fistfights that resulted from the earlier practice . A recently discovered newspaper interview with Wheaton indicates that the rules he and Tucker wrote for the Knickerbockers in most respects duplicated the rules he had written for the Gotham Club in 1837; the Knickerbockers were founded as a breakaway group of former Gothams . </P> <P> Writing the rules did not help the Knickerbockers in the first known competitive game between two clubs under the new rules, played at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 19, 1846 . The "New York nine" (almost certainly the parent Gotham Club) humbled the Knickerbockers by a score of 23 to 1 . Nevertheless, the Knickerbocker Rules were rapidly adopted by teams in the New York area and their version of baseball became known as the "New York Game" (as opposed to the "Massachusetts Game", played by clubs in the Boston area). </P>

Who played in the first baseball game ever