It is common for vintage ballists to point out that “base ball was two words back then.” John Thorn, Historian of Major League Baseball has pointed out that on occasion, the word would be printed as base-ball or even baseball, but that the one word version was quite uncommon. It didn’t become the most common form of the game’s name until 1897. [..]

The term “old fashioned base ball” appears to have been used in the decades after the 1850s to describe whatever game was played locally before the New York game arrived. The term was used extensively [..]