Thank you Google Books and Google News for proving that Abner Doubleday had little to nothing to do with the invention of Baseball. All one has to do is search for the phrase "Base Ball" between the years 1700 and 1830 and be swamped with references to the game. The earliest I've found so far being 1712. Base ball at that time was thought to be a child's instead of a man's game. By the mid 1850s America was in a base ball craze, having many clubs playing to mixed (male-female) crowds of thousands from New York to New Orleans.

David Upton