History of Professional Baseball in Texas

Baseball is an immensely popular American game, played between two teams of nine players each. The basic implements used in the game are a leather-covered ball, wooden bats for hitting the ball, and gloves for catching it. It is played at its highest level in the United States and two Canadian cities, where 26 teams make up the American and National Leagues (each with two divisions, East and West). Combined, these leagues are called major-league (professional) baseball. Most players who reach the major leagues have worked their way up through Little League, scholastic, college, and minor-league ball. In the early 1800s Americans began playing baseball on informal teams, using local rules. By the 1860s, the sport, unrivaled in popularity, was being described as America's “national pastime”. Alexander Joy Cartwright of New York invented the modern baseball field in 1845. Alexander Cartwright and the members of his New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club devised the first rules and regulations for the modern game of baseball. Baseball was based on the English game of rounders. Rounders becomes popular in the United States in the early 19th century, where the game was called "townball", "base", or "baseball". Cartwright formalized the modern rules of baseball. The first recorded baseball game in 1846 when Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbockers lost to the New York Baseball Club. [1] The popularity of baseball grew in Texas as Civil War veterans of both sides returned home, having played the game, or seen it played. The first reported baseball game in the Houston area was played on April 21, 1868, when the Houston Stonewalls defeated the Galveston Robert E. Lees 34-5 on the San Jacinto Battleground before a crowd of more than 1,000 people. Base ball spread throughout the state over the next two decades as a popular amateur