Forget Hoboken: Baseball may have been born in Canada

Posted on July 24, 2025 by Sunny South News

The first game of baseball was played on Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 19, 1846. The New Yorks (or New York Nine) crushed the New York Knickerbockers 23-1 in four innings. Alexander Cartwright, the “Father of Modern Baseball,” served as the umpire.

This game has been written about and discussed on many occasions. It’s been captured in several prints and illustrations. Visitors to Hoboken can look at a bronze plaque, The Birthplace of Baseball Monument, as well as the last extant piece of Elysian Fields.

Yet, what if I told you this story could be wrong? It’s possible that America’s national pastime may have started in the Great White North. After being reminded of this highly contentious tale of baseball lore by author/historian Craig Baird’s recent X post, I decided to expand upon it in this week’s column.

The first documented game of baseball may have been played in Beachville, Ontario on June 4, 1838. Teams from the neighbouring townships of Oxford and Zorra faced off “in the field behind the Beachville blacksmith’s shop,” David Giddens wrote for CBC Sports on June 15, 2017, and “perhaps in honour of the 100-year anniversary of King George III’s birthday.” (This point remains unproven, but there could be a correlation.)

The only reason we know about this game is because of Dr. Adam Ford of Denver, Colorado. He had previously lived in St. Marys, Ont., where the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is situated. The good doctor wrote an account that was published in the May 5, 1886 issue of Sporting Life.

“Ford recalls that the match was played on a square field in a pasture,” the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame’s website noted. “The competition between Beachville and Zorra featured five bases, fair and foul balls, players employing a hand hewn stick as a bat and a ball made of twisted yarn and covered with calf skin.”

Is this for real? Apparently so. “The Beachville District Historical Society has researched Ford’s account and has concluded that the information in his letter is authentic,” wrote the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. The Beachville District Museum, which houses the Historical Society, has a unique display about what it believes to be the first recorded game of baseball. Its website contains further details, too.

The two opposing teams were the Beachville Club and Zorras, who “hailed from the north townships of Zorra and Oxford.” The game was played on the field “just behind Enoch Burdick’s shops (today near Beachville’s Baptist Church).” Ford’s account stated “the ball was made of double-twisted, woolen yarn and covered with good, honest calfskin…sewn by Edward McNames, the local shoemaker,” while the bat was a club “generally made of the best cedar, blocked out with an axe and finished on a shaving horse with a draw knife. A wagon spoke or any nice straight stick would do.”

The Small Town Canada website includes two diagrams of the Beachville field, which have to be seen to be believed! The five bases were called “byes.” Overhand pitching was utilized, as opposed to America’s underhanded pitching style at the time. A batter was called out if a catch was made after a single ball bounce.

Ford’s Sporting Life letter mentioned this tidbit, too. “The game had a long history in his community,” the Beachville District Museum highlighted, “since ‘certain rules for the game’ were insisted upon by two of the older ‘gray haired’ players, ‘for it was the way they used to play when they were boys.’”

In fairness, there are skeptics of Canada’s claim to baseball history.

One significant voice is Andrew North, a director of the Centre for Canadian Baseball Research and coordinator of the Canada Baseball Hall of Fame’s research library. He presented some discrepancies in “The Beachville Game,” contained in his Society for American Baseball Research’s book, Our Game, Too: Influential Figures and Milestones in Canadian Baseball.

“Ford must have been only seven years old when he witnessed the game, and that nearly 50 years had passed between the witnessing and the writing,” North suggested. “It’s one thing to recall the names of some of the participants; after all, these families would have been among Ford’s neighbors when he was a child,” but “quite another to remember with exactitude such details as the distances between bases, distances that were likely not measured precisely to begin with.”

There are also salacious details about Ford.

While he became a successful physician in St. Mary’s and was elected mayor, he “also acquired a fondness for alcohol, a weakness that led to his temporary undoing.” He was held on suspicion for murder by a “vocal temperance proponent” who oddly claimed that Ford poisoned him during a late night drinking party. He was arrested and eventually released from prison due to a “lack of apparent motive.” His reputation was further sullied after an affair with a “woman of questionable repute” was exposed. He moved to Denver with his sons in 1880, just six years before writing to Sporting Life.

North used some pertinent quotes from researcher David Block that created some suspicions of doubt. Block believed Ford’s memory was “prodigious,” but the lack of a secondary reference or independent source suggested the “possibility that Ford could have remembered witnessing some sort of baseball-like contest at Beachville as a child.” And unless Ford was an “extraordinary savant, it is virtually impossible for a chronic drinker to remember with uncanny specificity, the rules, the precise dimensions, and the exact names of the participants of an event he witnessed 48 years earlier.”

Was the first baseball game played in America’s Hoboken or Canada’s Beachville? We may never know. Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s Mighty Casey has struck out, but the geographical location of his bat and ball remains up in the air.

Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.

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