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4 MAY 1871 · PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL BEGINS, QUIETLY
The game: The first game of the first professional baseball league drew a crowd of a few hundred — contemporary estimates start at about two hundred — kept down by threatening weather, and it holds its "first" partly by accident: the Boston–Washington game scheduled the same day was rained out. On the Camp Allen ground west of downtown, the Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat the Cleveland Forest Citys 2–0, in a game rain ended in the ninth. Deacon White led off with a double off Bobby Mathews — the first hit in league history — and was doubled off moments later. Mathews, twenty years old and five feet five, finished with the first win, the first complete game and the first shutout in the record books, at a score the site marker notes remained the lowest in the National Association's five-year history. The club folded before the season ended. A monument was unveiled on the site, now Camp Allen Park, on 4 May 2017 — a hundred and forty-six years after the few hundred watched.
Sources: the Events and Famous Locations sections of this history — the Retrosheet play-by-play rebuilt from the next day's Cleveland papers; SABR, Kekionga Ball Grounds; the Camp Allen Park marker and the TinCaps' game notes (the site line); the 2017 monument.