RENSSELAER - A baseball sailed into the air and made history 138 years ago.

On Tuesday, local officials and historians will formally recognize the first grand slam in Major League Baseball history by installing a plaque where the historic shot was hit.

Roger Connor was the first player to hit a grand slam in Major League Baseball history on Sept. 10, 1881, for the National League Troy Trojans in a game against the Worcester Ruby Legs.

The ball was long gone. So is the stadium where the ball was hit.

The path to proving the first grand slam was hit in Rensselaer was trod by local historian Matt Malette who runs the website albanyarchives.com.

Records has suggested the home run was hit in Riverside Park in Albany. But Albany's Riverside Park, a small pocket park along the Hudson River in downtown, opened in 1903, 21 years after the grand slam.

As columnist Paul Grondahl wrote in March, Malette found out there was a Riverside Park in Rensselaer, but Rensselaer did not get chartered as a city until 1897, 16 years after the grand slam.

Malette, who hosts local history trivia contests at area bars, dug deeper into the Riverside Park mystery. In 1881, the area that became the city of Rensselaer was the village of Greenbush and included two hamlets, Bath and East Albany. "Someone got it wrong 138 years ago by labeling the grand slam in Albany instead of East Albany," Malette said.

Malette eventually discovered that a ball field roughly the same dimensions as Yankees Stadium existed at the park. The best Malette could determine is that game was played in Rensselaer because the Trojan's field in Troy was soaked by a heavy rain storm recorded the day before.

The Sept. 10, 1881 game – a meaningless contest late in the season between two teams at the bottom of the standings – was moved to Riverside Park as an alternate site.

Official Major League Baseball historian John Thorn was initially reluctant to accept Malette's finding but eventually relenting and agreed Rensselaer was the home of the first grand slam.

Like the ball and the stadium, neither of the team exist anymore, victims of MLB's expansion into major population centers at the cost of smaller outposts like Troy and Worchester.