Baseball Began Earlier Than Historians Thought

The quest to nail down the origins of baseball has been thrown a curve, with the discovery of two newspaper articles showing the game was played earlier than historians thought.

The articles appeared on April 25, 1823, and show that an organized form of a game called “base ball” was being played in Manhattan, N.Y., in what today is Greenwich Village.

The articles were discovered by George A. Thompson Jr., a librarian at New York University. Historians long have wrestled with the task of discovering the true origins of the game--and whether it was invented or simply evolved.