based on the English game ofro unders. A game which began to become quite popular in this country in the early 19th century, and many sources report the growing popularity of a game called "townball", "base", or "baseball".

Throughout the early part of the 19th century, small towns formed teams, and baseball clubs were formed in larger cities. In 1845, Alexander Cartwright wanted to formalize a list of rules by which all teams could play. Much of that original code is still in place today. Although popular legend says that the game was invented by Abner Doubleday, baseball's true father was Cartwright.

For those of you who are steeped in the history and lore of the origins of baseball, this has indeed been an exciting year. The reason that the baseball world is abuzz is because there have been several notable recent \u201cdiscoveries\u201d relating to the game\u2019s beginnings that will provide grist for baseball historians for years to come. In a series of related articles, I will describe these discoveries and explain their significance to the development of the national pastime for they are all, in a real sense, linked. They truly give sustenance to those who are fascinated by the roots, the very origin, of what today is a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

The first recently uncovered jewel is what I will refer to as the \u201cPittsfield find,\u201d a bylaw from 1791 that was just uncovered in a small town Massachusetts courthouse. The second is a classic attic find of the first card that clearly shows youngsters playing a bat and ball game, a rudimentary form of the game that evolved into our national pastime.

In order to fully appreciate the significance of these two discoveries, a short baseball history lesson is in order. While the origins of the national pastime have taken on mythical proportions, history tells us that as long as there has been a child throwing a ball towards another child swinging a stick, there has always been something akin to baseball. Historians have even traced loosely defined bat and ball games to ancient civilizations. We know that contrary to the major league sanctioned Mills Commission Report from 1907, issued after a three-year investigation yielding scant evidence, the game was not \u201cinvented\u201d out of whole cloth in 1839 by Abner Doubleday one summer morning on a pastoral river bank in Cooperstown, New York. Doubleday was, in many respects, a great man who

In truth, the game evolved over many decades, if not centuries, and its roots are, in reality, a tangled web of bat and ball games brought to this country by immigrants. Some things are, however, certain. We know that baseball does have definite ties to the old English game of rounders and its cousin, the more formal and genteel game of cricket. Also, during the time period that our nation was literally taking form, there are many references to youngsters playing \u201ctown ball,\u201d an American form of rounders, in village greens throughout the northeastern part of the United States. Other similar ball games played on this side of the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1700\u2019s and for the first decades of the 1800\u2019s are the Dutch game of \u201cstool ball,\u201d an English game called \u201cold cat\u201d which actually featured a batter, pitcher and two bases, and yet another game balkanized from rounders called \u201cgoal ball.\u201d In that game, the \u201cgoal\u201d of the runner was to touch a series of bases.

In an attempt to date the birth of baseball in this country, as a distinct game from other bat and ball games that preceded it, historians have scoured public records, diaries and newspapers for decades in search of the elusive written word. What is the earliest written \u201creference\u201d to baseball as a distinct game in the United States? Up until very recently, it was thought to be a scant 1823 reference to the game of \u201cbase ball\u201d being played in lower Manhattan in a little known newspaper called the National Advocate. Now, however, thanks to baseball historian John Thorn and Jim Bouton (yes, the former major league baseball player), a bylaw has been uncovered from the musty records of a courthouse in a small town in western Massachusetts called Pittsfield. That statute, written in 1791, over 200 years ago, aims to protect windows in a \u201cnew\u201d town meeting house by prohibiting anyone from playing \u201cbaseball\u201d within 80 yards of the building.

This is a truly remarkable find as the written record now pulls the national pastime into the 1700\u2019s. This is decades before the previously found \u201cearliest\u201d written reference. Further, the statute itself mentions other prohibited games (wicket, cricket, batball, football, cats and fives) thus lending irrefutable evidence to the fact that baseball, at least in 1791 America, was a distinct game with its own identity. To put things into their proper historical perspective, the statute, with its specific reference to \u201cbaseball,\u201d was written by the Pittsfield elders only four short years after the United States Constitution was ratified. We now know the game was distinctive and we also know that the game \u2013 called \u201cbase ball\u201d \u2013 was popular enough to be prohibited! Did it have its own rules? Who knows, but I

Neither spitting nor swearing were tolerated, nor could the thrower - as the pitcher was known - throw a strike. If a hit was caught on its first bounce, the striker - as the batter was known - was called out. And you didn't dare think about stealing home.

These are but a few of the differences between the game of baseball of today and when "base ball" first started in the mid-1800s, brought to life by the Ohio Village Muffins and the Diamonds Ladies Base Ball Club. Organized by the Ohio Historical Society (OHS). both teams play "base ball" as it was intended and without the benefit of gloves, which hadn't yet been invented.

The two teams will play a number of "matches" and special events around the state this month and at Ohio Village in Columbus, with the Muffins continuing their games through early November. Both teams also will play host to the 12th annual Ohio Cup Vintage Base Ball Festival during Labor Day weekend. They'll welcome 18 gentlemen's and two ladies' teams to Ohio Village for the country's largest gathering of vintage base ball clubs, representing eras from 1845 to 1924.

"The Muffins were the country's first vintage base ball team, formed in 1981 to help re-create everyday life in a typical 1860s Ohio village, which ties right in with Ohio's Bicentennial celebration," said Doug Smith, team manager of both OHS teams, who works in the OHS education department. "We've also helped inspire nearly 50 other vintage teams around the country and in Canada."

The Muffins' name playfully salutes the early days of the game when a "muffin" was a player who fumbled the ball while trying to catch it. They wear a scarlet bow tie, tall striped cap and a flowing white, shield-front shirt bearing a crim- son "M," a uniform patterned after an 1866 Currier and Ives print called "The American National Game."

Smith helped organize the Diamonds Ladies in 1994 to portray an 1860s women's college team. Like the women they depict, they play their matches in full-length, 19th-century street clothes.

Base ball teams like the Muffins and the Diamonds Ladies had their roots in several ball-and-stick games of the 1830s, especially the British game of rounders and the American game of townball. In 1845, a group of New Yorkers founded the Knickerbockers Base BallClub and wrote the first set of rules. Other base ball clubs quickly followed and devised their own codes. Soon the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed, which standardized the game.

"At first, base ball was a game for the wealthy uppercrust, but it swiftly spread up and down the social ladder," Smith said. "Anyone could play the game, so a whole community could turn out for a picnic and a match, and they all could defend