HISTORY

On Rickey's first team was a catcher named Charles Thomas, one of the first blacks in college baseball. During the season, Thomas was denied lodging at a hotel in Indiana. While Rickey was able to convince the hotel's manager to allow Thomas to stay in Rickey's room as an unregistered guest, the event burned into his memory and was an inspiration in signing Jackie Robinson some 40 years later... thus breaking professional baseball's "color barrier".

Branch Rickey is also credited with establishing the farm system, pioneering the use of batting helmets and engineering the first expansion of Major League Baseball.

Ohio Wesleyan fielded its first official baseball team in 1889 and went 3-3 that first season. During the program's infancy, a young Branch Rickey (who later would become a professional baseball pioneer in a number of areas and most famous for his role in breaking baseball's "color barrier") enrolled in school and played ball in 1901-1902.

After signing a professional contract, making him ineligible for further intercollegiate competition, Rickey became the school's head baseball coach and athletic director in 1903.

Shortly thereafter, the first collegiate baseball game was played on July 1, 1859 between Amherst College and Williams College. Therefore it is not surprising that much of the history of baseball in Delaware, Ohio centers arould its own Ohio Wesleyan University.

Americans began playing baseball on informal teams, using local rules, in the late 1790s and early 1800s. By the 1860s, the sport, unrivaled in popularity, was being described as America's "national pastime."

Alexander Cartwright (1820-1892) of New York has been credited with inventing the modern baseball field in 1845. He and the members of his New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, devised the first rules and regulations for the modern game of baseball.

Baseball was based on the English game of rounders. Rounders become popular in the United States in the early 19th century, where the game was called "townball", "base", or "baseball".

The first recorded baseball game is believed to have been played in 1846 when Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbockers lost to the New York Baseball Club. The game was held at the Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1858, the National Association of Base Ball Players, the first organized baseball league was formed.