Historically, the invention of baseball was credited to future US Army officer Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. At least, that was the conclusion of the so-called Mills Commission, appointed by former professional baseball player Albert Goodwin Spalding, in 1905, to definitively determine the origins of baseball. In a letter dated November 17, 1905, sent directly to Spalding, mining engineer Abner Graves stated, ‘Abner Doubleday unquestionably invented Base Ball at Cooperstown, New York’ and, while he could not ‘positively name the year’, he was ‘sure it was either 1839, 1840 or 1841’.
In any event, Doubleday became a cadet at the US Military Academy, a.k.a. ‘West Point’, in 1838 and did not graduate until 1842, so Graves’ account is almost certainly apocryphal. Furthermore, Doubleday never claimed to have anything to do with baseball, let alone inventing the sport; when he died, in 1893, his obituary made no mention of baseball, but did state that he was ‘rather averse to outdoor sports’.
The most plausible explanation for the invention of baseball, as espoused by the so-called ‘Father of Baseball’, Henry Chadwick, among others, was that the sport derived from the old English game of rounders, which was first documented in ‘A Little Pretty Pocket-Book’ by John Newbery, first published in 1744. Interestingly, the book also contains the earliest documented use of the word ‘baseball’.
The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, a.k.a. the New York Knickerbockers, founded in 1845, is credited with formulating a set of rules for baseball, unsurprisingly dubbed the ‘Knickerbocker Rules’, many of which still remain. The first ‘official’ baseball match was played, under those rules, between the Knickerbockers and the New York Nine at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 1, 1846. The New York Nine won 23-1 in four innings.