l writer and the inventor of the box score. Chadwick argued that he had seen the game played in Great Britain, where it was called "rounders"--a game still played by children in Britain in which a ball is pitched, hit, the bat is dropped, and the player runs to a base to avoid being tagged out. Chadwick argued that rounders migrated to the United States where it was played in open town fields and became known in this nation as "town ball." There is considerable evidence supporting Chadwick's assertion that baseball at least pre-dates the Cooperstown landmark of 1839. Like their European forebears, children in the early colonies played stick-and-ball games for decades before Cooperstown. Thomas Jefferson, for example, once wrote a letter in 1785 criticizing the sport, saying that "games played with ball stamp no character on the mind." Two years later, the faculty at the staunchly religious school Presbyterian College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) adopted a resolution prohibiting "a play at present practiced by the small boys among the students and by the grammar scholars with balls and sticks in the rear campus." The students, according to the faculty, should find ways to entertain themselves that were more dignified.
The shape of the infield varied in early town ball. In some areas of the nation, the infield was an odd oblong shape; in other areas, it was square with wooden posts substituting for bases. Town ball was never a diamond square as in today's game.
This fact was enough to prompt Spalding in 1905 to help form the Mills Commission to offer a definitive answer as to when and where baseball was originated. Chaired by Mills, other commission members included United States senators Arthur Gorman of Maryland and Morgan Bulkeley of Connecticut. The commission relied heavily on the written testimony of Abner Graves. Graves wrote that when he was a Cooperstown schoolboy in 1839, he saw Abner Doubleday...