MLB | The First Game That Was Not the First Game (Elysian Fields, Hoboken)

On 19 June 1846 a club called the New York Base Ball Club beat the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club 23-1, in four innings, on a stretch of parkland in Hoboken. Alexander Cartwright, one of the Knickerbockers' own players, umpired, and fined somebody six cents on the spot for swearing.

This is the game usually called the first organised baseball match ever played. It was not, and the people who say so are mostly not lying, just repeating something that has been repeated for a century.

The Knickerbockers had been playing recorded games at Elysian Fields since the previous autumn. A game on 6 October 1845 ended 11-8 in three innings, and they may have played a dozen or more before the year was out. The New York Morning News printed a box score of a game here on 22 October 1845, eight months before the famous one. And the New York Base Ball Club that turned up in June 1846 was made up largely of men who had been Knickerbockers and had got tired of the ferry ride to Hoboken, which means the celebrated first interclub match may have been another intramural game with a different name on the scorecard.

The fame of that particular afternoon is, as John Thorn, Major League Baseball's own official historian, has written about the sport's origins generally, a product of myth-making that the game did to itself on purpose.

Cartwright is the clearest case. His plaque in Cooperstown calls him the father of modern baseball and credits him with innovations that historians have since attributed elsewhere or dated later. He was a real and important organiser. He was not a lone inventor, because there was not one.

What is true is that this ground mattered. Elysian Fields was a commercial pleasure park on the bluff above the Hudson, cleared for ball games in 1831, reachable by ferry from Manhattan, and for roughly forty years it was where clubs from New York, New Jersey and Brooklyn came to play each other. Cricket was played here too, and the New York Yacht Club put its first clubhouse here. The game did not begin at this spot. It grew up at this spot, which is a better claim and a rarer one.

Nothing of the field remains. The site is now streets and buildings in uptown Hoboken. Four corners at Eleventh and Washington carry base-shaped markers, and a monument nearby records what happened.

Coordinates are the junction of Eleventh and Washington Streets, from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: The American National Game of Base Ball, Grand Match for the Championship at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1866. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCCN 90708565. Public domain. Second image: the Elysian Fields marker in Hoboken, photographed by Nightscream, 2010, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.