NEW YORK — The quest to nail down the origins of baseball has been thrown a curve, with the discovery of two newspaper articles showing the game was played earlier than historians thought.

        The articles appeared on April 25, 1823, and show that an organized form of a game called “base ball” was being played in Manhattan.

        The articles were discov ered by George A. Thompson Jr., a librarian at New York University. Historians have long wrestled with the task of discovering the true origins of the game.

        For decades the widely accepted version was that Maj. Gen. Abner Doubleday dreamed up the game in 1839 and later encouraged it among his Union troops during the Civil War.

        That legend led to the founding of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Doubleday's hometown of Cooperstown, N.Y., although later evidence pointed to the first real game being played in Hoboken, N.J., in 1846.

        Last fall Mr. Thompson was poking through the pages of the long-forgotten National Advocate when he discovered a brief item from 1823 referring to Saturday games of “base ball” at Broadway and 8th Street in lower Manhattan.

        The same day the New-York Gazette and General Advertiser carried a one-paragraph item saying it had “received a communication in favor of the manly exercise of base ball.”

        “When I found the item, I was struck by the fact that the game was actually called "base ball,' and that it had to be a very early reference, if not the earliest,” Mr. Thompson said Sunday.

        The newspapers saw no need to explain what “base ball” was, Mr. Thompson noted, suggesting that many people were already familiar with the game.

        The Baseball Hall of Fame confirmed the 1823 articles represent at least a very early reference to the game, Mr. Thompson said.

        Recently, historians credited Alexander Cartwright and the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club with inventing many of baseball's rules for the 1846 Hoboken game. Mr. Thompson said a newspaper in 1825 in Oneonta, N.Y., referred to a game of “base ball” there — two years after the one in Manhattan.

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