America's pastime began in New York. But baseball wouldn’t exist without New Jersey.

It’s baseball season, and the nation’s pastime has for generations been a core part of American summer culture. And you wouldn’t have any of it if it wasn’t for New Jersey. Sort of.

Sure, baseball was born in the streets of Manhattan. While a variety of stick-and-ball games descended from cricket and rounders popped up in early American cities, it was New Yorkers who wrote the rules that defined the modern game and it was New Yorkers who pushed their game to broader popularity.

But baseball was nurtured and given space to grow through its critical infancy in Hoboken, New Jersey. The sport doesn’t become America’s national pastime without the Garden State.

“If the Hall of Fame was in a place that made sense — there's absolutely no reason that it's in Cooperstown, New York — Elysian Fields would be a much, much better option,” said Thomas Gilbert, a baseball historian and author of the book “How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed, The Truth Revealed.”

Gilbert knows the story of the sport’s rise better than almost anyone. And he knows which parts of that origin story hold up in the historical record, and which parts are more mythology.

There’s a common story that the first recorded baseball game was held on June 19, 1846 in Hoboken, at a sprawling park called Elysian Fields, hosted by the first baseball club, called the New York Knickerbockers. The club faced off not against a rival club, but against a squad of their friends called the New York Nine.

Gilbert can point out a few problems with that story. That game wasn’t the first to be recorded — a few in New York had been written about in local newspapers months before. And the Knickerbockers weren’t the first baseball club.

“Because of accidents of history, the New York Public Library has a huge amount of records and information from the Knickerbocker Club. And other clubs, there was almost nothing,” Gilbert said. “Because they left a lot of records, their importance is exaggerated.”

The Knickerbockers lost that hallowed game on June 19, 1846, by the way, and they lost it badly. The final score was 23-1.

It begs a question, Gilbert said: If the Knickerbockers were supposedly the most important group to baseball’s creation, how could they have lost so badly?

“Imagine if you and I invented a sport, and then we rounded up a bunch of novices to play it, and we lost 23-1,” Gilbert said. “That's sort of absurd.”

But Elysian Fields was real. And, Gilbert said, it was as important a place to baseball’s development as any.

New York City had few open spaces for people to use at that time. The Stevens family, which founded Hoboken and once owned all of the land that makes up the city today, knew there was a need for a grand park for city residents to use.

The answer to that problem was Elysian Fields. The sprawling riverfront park, served by a cross-Hudson ferry to Barclays Street in Lower Manhattan, became a place where New Yorkers could go to get some fresh air and experience the latest and greatest in entertainment.

“There were all kinds of events. P.T. Barnum put on things there. There were Penobscot Indians doing canoe races,” Gilbert said. “The Elysian Fields becomes an ancestor of about five or six different types of institutions that we have around now.”

And critically, Gilbert said, there were ballfields. Ballfields in the heart of a park visited by thousands and thousands of people, giving baseball exposure to fuel its growth.

“There was a real problem with playing space, and you could argue that the Stevens family making these playing fields available in Hoboken might have saved baseball, and certainly helped its development,” Gilbert said.

One of the people who stumbled on baseball at Elysian Fields was Henry Chadwick, a sports journalist who in 1856 was returning from covering a game of cricket — which had been played in America since British colonists arrived — when he saw a baseball game in the park.

“He's shocked by the level of organization and how seriously it's all being taken. They're having practices in uniforms and people are keeping score,” Gilbert said. “It hits him like a religious experience that this is the game that Americans are going to play, not cricket.”

Today, Chadwick is sometimes called the “Father of Baseball.” He invented statistics like batting average, created the box score and wrote the earliest baseball books.

Eventually, the sport outgrew the park. By the late 1850s and early 1860s, more baseball clubs had been established in Manhattan, Brooklyn and beyond. Crowds grew as people started following the clubs and taking an interest in who won and who lost. But Elysian Fields lacked the infrastructure to handle crowds, Gilbert said, and the Stevens family wasn’t interested in making that sort of investment.

“There's really no such thing as fans of team sports in the United States until baseball in the 1860s. And the Elysian Fields look like Central Park's baseball diamonds,” Gilbert said. “There's no stands. There's no berm to sit on or anything. There's just a diamond in the middle of some grass.”

“People played there for decades after that, but it no longer was that important to baseball because baseball was turning into something else,” Gilbert said. “It didn't fit there.”

Elysian Fields is gone, save for a slice of land with a small playground dubbed Elysian Park. Visitors today can find brass markers at the intersection of 11th Street and Washington Street — the location of the original baseball diamond.