[Ads-l] baseball in New York City 1805

[Peter Reitan]

This is isn't strictly linguistic evidence of "baseball" by that name, but about identifying an early description of the game we know as "baseball" played in New York decades earlier than previous evidence supported.

A recent post on twitter, by MLB's official historian, John Thorn, discussed a recent discovery of evidence of baseball being played in New York City in 1805 (although not by that name).  The word "base ball" is much older, but was used for a different game.  The 1805 examples refer to the game alternately as "base", "bace" or "basse."

https://twitter.com/thorn_john/status/1762152156923113900
https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/baseball-in-new-york-in-1805-286c2da638f5

Details in the recently discovered reference, referring to "hands in" (innings) have convinced baseball historians that the game described is actually something like American baseball, and not an earlier game with a similar name.

The new finds supplement earlier, ambiguous reference from the same year he had written about earlier, but which were not clearly what we know as baseball.
https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/an-enigmatic-1805-game-of-bace-in-new-york-a1929789f158




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