Although Doubleday had been given credit for his invention , some baseball historians say it was Alexander Cartwright and his friends that devised the new game in 1845, is was called the Knickerbocker game or the New York game ,and it differed in several respects from what we now know as baseball, For instance , players caught the ball barehanded , Fortunately , the ball was a lot lighter than the one used today ; it was slightly larger and very bouncy, because it contained a core of rubber, there was no umpire saying whether a pitch was a ball or a strike, the batters could just stand at home plate and wait, all day if they got a pitch they wanted to swing at.