Most baseball histories will tell you that the Knickerbocker club of New York City wrote the first baseball rules and that they played the first baseball game in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 19, 1846. They will not tell you how the Knickerbockers managed to lose that game, 23-1. This is not the only problem with the Knickerbocker origin tale which, if it were a boat, would have sunk to the bottom of the Hudson a long time ago.

The whole story goes like this.

In 1845, a group of amateur athletes from New York City formed the first baseball club and published the first baseball rules. In some versions of the story, bank clerk Alexander Cartwright was the driving force behind both. All of the Knickerbockers were white men; almost all of them were native-born Protestants. Among other rules innovations, the club was the first to outlaw the practice of “soaking,” which meant smacking baserunners with a thrown ball in order to put them out. This was an important step forward in baseball’s evolution from a children’s pastime because adults preferred a game from which they did not have to limp home. Running out of playing space in New York City, the Knickerbockers wandered in the wilderness until in 1845 they found a home on the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, fifteen minutes by ferry from lower Manhattan. The Knickerbockers were influential gentlemen who popularized the game. Up sprang the Eagles, Gothams and Empires. These were followed by many more imitators in Brooklyn, New Jersey and the greater New York metropolitan area. The first players were dilettantes who put more effort into post-game banquets than into vulgar pursuits like recruiting, training or trying to win. The Knickerbockers ruled over baseball until, to their dismay, the game spread downward to the unwashed working classes. As it spread outward to Boston, Philadelphia and the rest of the country, the Knickerbockers lost control over the sport that they had made, opening a Pandora’s box of professionalism, gambling and corruption.

Two parts of this story are true. Almost all of the Knickerbockers were white American-born Protestants and the Barclay Street ferry did get you to Hoboken in fifteen minutes.

How did baseball really happen? That is a different, longer story.