"Baseball is older than the American nation itself. There are tales about Abner Doubleday's "devising" the game at Coopertown, New York, in 1839. But long before General George Washington struck out Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, sports-hungry American colonists living along the eastern seaboard were playing it. Robert W. Henderson, a sportsman who is also an executive officer of the New York Public Library, has produced inimpeachable evidence to show that the game is closely related to the old West England sport of rounders, and that there was a baseball game in England as early as 1744."