Charlton’s Baseball Chronology, compiled by James Charlton and an army of fifty researchers, remains the definitive chronicle of every important event throughout baseball history. First published in 1991, it includes all the great moments in the major leagues, individual highlights from the majors and minors, Negro leagues, Japanese leagues, Latin American ball and collegiate baseball.Contrary to the Doubleday-Cooperstown myth created by the Spalding Commission, baseball evolved rather than having been invented. From the first recorded game in 1845, through the establishment of professional teams in the 1860s and leagues in the 1870s, the 19th century was baseball’s formative period in which the basic rules and structures of the game gradually assumed the form we know today.
To make the book more accessible to an online audience, BaseballLibrary.com has compiled a timeline of baseball history below; you may jump to individual seasons using the year-by-year timeline to the left of each era.