When in about the year 1842, or earlier, Dr. D.L. Adams, Alexander J. Cartwright, Colonel James Lee, Duncan F. Curry, E.R. Dupignac, William F. Ladd, and other prominent business and professional men of New York City, seeking some medium for outdoor exercise, turned to the boy’s game of Base Ball, there was not a code of rules nor any written records of the game, and their only guide to the method of playing was their own recollection of the game as they themselves, when boys, had played it and the rules of the game then in existence, which had come down, like folklore, from generation to generation from boys.

Excerpt of John M. Ward’s letter to A.G. Mills, Richter’s History and Records of Base Ball