American Notes NEW YORK

Baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday in 1839 at Cooperstown, N.Y., home of the game's Hall of Fame. Wrong. Well, then, baseball was first played in Hoboken, N.J., in 1846, using rules devised by a bank clerk named Alexander J. Cartwright. Wrong again, according to a fresh discovery by Harvard graduate student Edward L. Widmer. In archives of the New-York Historical Society, he found an article in the New York Morning News describing a game on Oct. 21, 1845, between the New York Ball Club and a Brooklyn team. Moreover, by alluding to a "friendly match of the time-honored game," the story suggests even earlier baseball.

Why the ever shifting history? Baseball did not have an "immaculate conception," in the phrase of David Q. Voigt, author of a three-volume history of the game. It evolved out of children's bat-and-ball games, like the 18th century English boys' game called rounders. The new discovery, says Voigt, simply confirms this theory. In the 1845 game New York won, scoring a grand slam -- called "four aces."