Baseball Before 1845
Despite the myth that baseball sprang full-blown from the mind of Abner Doubleday in 1839, a game called baseball was around more than a hundred years earlier.
It was probably just another name for rounders at first. But A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, printed in England in 1744, mentioned both baseball and rounders, suggesting that there was some distinction between the two by then.
Although primarily a boys' game, it was also played by girls. In Northanger Abbey, begun in 1796, Jane Austen said of her heroine, ". . . it was not very wonderful that Catherine should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the age of fourteen, to books."
The game of "bat and ball" was common in America before the Revolution, according to William Winterbotham's An Historical View of the United States (1796). By the time of the Revolution, it was commonly called "base" or "baste." And it wasn't necessarily a game for boys any more: American soldiers played it at Valley Forge in 1776 and the Princeton faculty banned it from the campus in 1787.
Early in the nineteenth century, two forms of baseball became very popular in the East. They were the Massachusetts game, also known as "town ball," and the New York game.
The Massachusetts game used a smaller, harder ball and, in one important variation, allowed the pitcher to throw overhand. In the New York game, as in crickets and rounders, an underhand delivery was required.
Both games were similar to rounders in several ways. The batter (who was called the "striker") stood at a spot roughly halfway between fourth base and first base. When he circled the bases, he didn't actually make a full circuit, since he ended up about thirty feet from where he had begun. There was no foul territory; even if the ball glanced off the bat behind the striker, he had to try running to first. And, in most variations of either game, a runner was out when hit by the thrown ball while between bases (a practice called "soaking").