1845 October 11 – A club from Brooklyn defeats one from New York (i.e. Manhattan) at the Union Star Cricket Ground in Brooklyn, the home team winning 22–1. The game is reported in the New York Morning News and True Sun newspapers.
1845 October 21 – A second baseball game is played between the New York and Brooklyn clubs at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, New Jersey, with New York prevailing 24–4, and the first known box score appears in the New York Morning News the following day.
1845 October 25 – The rubber game is played between New York and Brooklyn at the Union Star Cricket Ground, New York taking the game and the series by a score of 34–19.
1850 April – The Eagle Club is formed. The Gotham Club is organized.[4]
1852 – The Eagle Club publishes its rules.
1854 – The Knickerbocker, Gotham and Eagle clubs agree on a unified set of rules. The pitching distance is defined for the first time, as "not less than 15 paces."
1854 October 12 – The Empire club is formed in Manhattan but plays in Hoboken.
1854 December 8 – The Excelsior club established in South Brooklyn.
1857 January – The Independent club founded in New York.
1857 January 22 and February 25 – The National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) is formed in meetings of sixteen New York area baseball clubs, and promulgates revised rules including nine-inning games, nine-man teams and 90 feet between the bases.[6]
1857 March – The Liberty club established in New Brunswick.
1857 March 4 – The Metropolitan club organized in New York.
1857 March 14 – The Champion club organized in New York.
1857 March 23 – The Hamilton club established in Brooklyn.
1857 April 28 – The St. Nicholas club organized in Hoboken.
1858 – The first all-star games, and the first baseball games to charge admission, took place in Corona, Queens, New York, at the Fashion Race Course. [7] The called strike is introduced.
1859 – The Potomac Club is formed in the summer and the National club in November in Washington, D.C.
1860 February 22 – First recorded baseball game played in San Francisco, California between the San Francisco Eagles and the San Francisco Red Rovers.[10]
1860 September 28 – The first baseball game reported between two named black teams. At Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, the Weeksville of New York beat the Colored Union Club 11–0.
1862 April – The Summit City Club is formed in Fort Wayne, Indiana (the club would reform as the Kekionga in 1866).
1864 – The called ball and base-on-balls are introduced.
1865 – The "fly rule" introduced: fair balls caught on the first bounce are no longer outs.
1865 August 30 – President Andrew Johnson welcomes the Atlantic and National clubs to the White House in the first documented case of the long-standing tradition of inviting successful sports teams to meet with the President.[11]
Marshall Wright publishes 1868 season records for 98 teams, many of them incomplete ("(inc)" in the table). Bill Ryczek calls 15 of that season's teams "major" (not marked). This table covers all of those "majors" (not marked), all of the 1869 "pros" (*), all 14 member clubs with at least twelve wins on record, and a few others. For the seven listed clubs in Greater New York, no city is named in the first column; the comment gives their locales.
At least four Association clubs not listed here would someday try professionalism: Riverside of Portsmouth, Ohio (1870); Kekionga of Fort Wayne, Indiana (1871); Middletown of Mansfield, Connecticut (1872); Resolute of Elizabeth, New Jersey (1873).
Meanwhile, only two brand new professional baseball clubs would be established in the next three years, the Chicago White Stockings for 1870 and the Boston Red Stockings for 1871. Their commercial origins may be related to their survival alone by 1877, and on to 2010, while all of their rivals with older and amateur roots fell away.
Marshall Wright publishes 1867 season records for 89 teams, many of them incomplete ("(inc)" in the table). Bill Ryczek calls 17 of that season's teams "major" (not marked). This table covers all of those "majors", all 13 member clubs with at least fourteen wins on record, and a few others. For the nine listed clubs in Greater New York, no city is named in the first column; the comment gives their locales.
Star (*) marks ten clubs among twelve who would go pro in 1869. Excelsior of Chicago and Buckeye of Cincinnati are listed because they were probably the strongest teams in the west after the Cincinnati Red Stockings.
Marshall Wright publishes 1866 season records for 58 of 93 association members, said to be complete for games between two member clubs. Bill Ryczek calls 20 of that season's teams "major" including three old New York rivals of the Knickerbockers.
This table covers all of those "majors", all 14 members with at least eight wins on record, and a few others. For the fifteen listed clubs in Greater New York, no city is named in the first column; the comment gives their locales.
For the preceding 1865 season Marshall Wright lists 30 members with supposedly complete records for most of them. Twenty-two of the thirty were in Greater New York. Bill Ryczek calls 19 teams "major" in the first season that he covers: sixteen of the members and three others (Lowell, Harvard, and Camden).
No one traveled much and membership was still depressed by the Civil War. There had been 59 delegates at the March 1860 annual meeting, and 55 at the next annual meeting that December (on a new baseball calendar), who thereby intended to play during the 1861 season that the war curtailed. Nine of 59 and eleven of 55 were from outside Greater New York.[12]
^This may refer to the existing New Yorks/Gothams adopting a formal constitution and by-laws.
^This may have been an offshoot of South Brooklyn's Star Cricket Club.
^The sixteen clubs were the Knickerbocker, Baltic, Eagle, Empire, Gotham, and Harlem of New York; Atlantic, Bedford, Continental, Eckford, Excelsior, Harmony, Nassau, Olympic and Putnam of Brooklyn; and Union of Morrisania
^Franks, Joel (2001). Whose baseball?: the national pastime and cultural diversity in California, 1859–1941. Scarecrow Press. p. 31. ISBN978-0-8108-3927-4.
Orem, Preston D. (1961). Baseball (1845–1881) From the Newspaper Accounts. Altadena, California: Self-published.
Ryczek, William J. (1998). When Johnny Came Sliding Home: The Post-Civil War Baseball Boom, 1865–1870. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. ISBN0-7864-0514-7.
Wright, Marshall D. (2000). The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857–1870. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. ISBN0-7864-0779-4.
