We all know where baseball was born: The rules used to play the game today were evolved directly from the rules set down by Alexander Cartwright for a game played in 1846 at Elysian Fields in Hoboken.

But the rest of the world seems determined to rob Hoboken of its title.First and most famously, Cooperstown, N.Y., claimed to be the birthplace of baseball, but that has been thoroughly debunked. Then we had Pittsfield, Mass., which got some press after a municipal bylaw from 1791 was found banning "Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Football, Cat, Fives or any other game or games with balls" from being played within 80 yards of the town meeting house.

But it's not certain the game being banned in Pittsfield had anything in common with our National Pastime. In fact, a children's book printed in 1744 in England has a rhyme titled "Base-Ball", but it appears under a picture of what appears to be boys playing stoolball.

A letter published in 1886 claimed there was a game played with three outs per inning in Ontario, Canada, on June 4, 1838, but again, it's not clear if the game described was baseball as we would know it, or a derivation of rounders.

Cooperstown, Pittsfield, Ontario... and now Rotterdam?

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.

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.