Hoboken Now: The birthplace of baseball?

And Hoboken is the home of The Feelies! (and their reunion)...Huh? Wha? Hail Don? Who’s Don?

A story in the International Herald Tribune about former Yankee Robert Eenhoorn, who is now 40 and coaching the Dutch national baseball team, reports that some Dutch baseball fans believe the game is as American as Dutch apple pie.

Indeed, some Dutch fans, like Pim Van Nes, a retired diplomat and part-time sportswriter, speculate that baseball could be a descendant of the old Dutch game of “tripbal,” now extinct, that the Pilgrims Fathers may have taken with them when they left the Netherlands for America. If true, that unlikely tale would make Rotterdam, not Hoboken’s Elysian Fields, the cradle of baseball.

They’re not the only Europeans claiming to have invented the game. The English have long said that baseball resembles rounders (or stoolball); in Romania, they play oina; Russia has lapta; the French played “poisoned ball”; and the Germans played Schlagball. (You can read a lot more about the history of baseball - and forerunner games like stoolball - in David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It.)

It’s clear there were a variety of baseball-like games played under various rules (and names) before 1846. Cartwright didn’t invent the game out of thin air, but rather codefied one set of rules for the game. Those rules were the founding document for the rules of the game we play today.

And where were Cartwright’s rules used for the first time?

Hoboken.