The site of the first recorded baseball game on June 19, 1846 in Hoboken, NJ. The New York Knickerbockers, led by Alexander Cartwright, hosted the New York Base Ball Club, and lost 23-1. The teams played using the rules that Cartwright had drawn up the previous summer, and baseball was born. Nineteen years later, the Elysian Fields played host to the first Baseball Championship, officially called the "Grand Match for the Championship of the United States," between the New York Mutuals and the New York Atlantics.
Elysian Fields was nothing like a modern ballpark; just a level plain which had been previously used for cricket matches and a tourist attraction. The land was owned by John Cox Stevens, founder of the New York Yacht Club, and after a gambling scandal, he closed the fields to baseball in 1867; by 1869 it had fallen victim to the expansion of Hoboken's downtown.