History of Springfield, Massachusetts the first American motorcycle company (1901, "Indian"), an early commercial radio station (1921, WBZ, and most famously, the world's third-most-popular sport of basketball (1891, Dr. James Naismith). Puritan fur trader William Pynchon was an original settler of Roxbury, Massachusetts, a magistrate, and then assistant treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1635, he commissioned a scouting expedition led by John Cable and John Woodcock to find the Connecticut River Valley's most suitable site for the dual purposes of agriculture and trading. The expedition traveled either across the inland Bay Path from Boston to Albany via Springfield or, equally likely, along
The Massachusetts Game from a set of rules drawn up in 1858 by the Massachusetts Association of Base Ball Players at Dedham. Although it was recognizably a type of baseball, some features of the Massachusetts Game are very different from modern baseball: Two "modern" features of the Massachusetts Game were not present in New York-style rules drawn up the same year by National Association of Base Ball Players. The Massachusetts Game was more wide-open than modern "New York" baseball, with more scoring and, its proponents claimed, more excitement. First base was only 30 feet away from the striker. There was a constant supply