The truest version of events is that baseball wasn’t invented by anyone. It’s kind of like barbecue sauce. There are lots of versions, and they all have their delightful regional differences, but nobody can claim real authorship.

Baseball, as we know it, came together fitfully, over decades and decades. There are etchings of people playing something called "Bass-Ball" in Guildford in Southern England in the 1740s. And certainly, English immigrants to Canada and the U.S. brought games like cricket and rounders and stickball with them. So there was plenty of baseball-ish play going on in North America as far back as the mid-1800s.

In 1791, Pittsfield, Mass., passed a bylaw forbidding all manner of ball games in the field near the town meeting house. Glass was expensive, and the town had gotten fed up with replacing broken windows. "Baseball" was on the long list of Pittsfield’s verboten hijinx, so there is recorded proof that "baseball" — whatever that actually meant — was a known thing way back then. And obviously, it was slowly changing and growing in popularity. But while that was going on, it was happening beyond the notice of any newspapers or record keepers.

It turns out that the earliest, detailed, reputable account of baseball being played in North America came out of a game in Beachville, Ont., which is in the Woodstock-London neck of the woods. The date of record is June 4, 1838. Teams from the neighbouring townships of Oxford and Zorra squared off. An eyewitness to the game wrote about it (admittedly, a few decades after the fact) in the pages of Sporting Life magazine.

The game was played in the field behind the Beachville blacksmith’s shop, perhaps in honour of the 100-year anniversary of King George III’s birthday. (Though that date might be a coincidence. Was there ever a time when people said, “We must play baseball to honour a long dead king?” That would be like insisting we all polka on Remembrance Day.)

The Beachville game would be recognizable to fans of modern baseball, with a couple of quirks. They had five bases, rather than four, which were called "byes" back then. And if catches were made after a single bounce, the batter was out. The other thing that might have seemed odd to Americans at the time is that the Beachville pitching was overhand, as in the modern game. Underhand pitching was the most common style in the U.S. at the time.

Twenty-nine years ago, the CBC interviewed the citizens of Beachville as they were making merry on the 150th anniversary of this first game.