Baseball’s Magna Carta – Setting The Rules Of America’s Game

Documents that the official historian of Major League Baseball declared “the Magna Carta of America’s national pastime” are the centerpiece of this new exhibit. This is the first public display of these 1857 papers, which only recently came to light at an auction in California. More, the content of the documents thoroughly change the early history of baseball by naming Daniel “Doc” Adams the proper father of the modern game, not the often mis-credited Abner Doubleday.

The hand-written documents were drafted by Adams for presentation to an unprecedented special meeting of all New York area baseball clubs in 1857, and include his notations of the meeting’s proceedings. Up until this meeting, games were played under a variety of rules, including teams that ranged from eight to eleven players, games that ended when a team scored twenty-one runs, and no set base path distances. Among other rules, the document entitled “Laws of Base Ball” established the base paths at ninety feet, conclusively set the number of men to a side at nine, and fixed the duration of the game at nine innings.