[molenick]

The expanded second edition of William Clarke's The Boy's Own Book (1828) includes the first description in English of a bat-and-ball game played on a diamond (in the book, the game is called rounders). I don’t have that book.

In 1834, Robin Carver's The Book of Sports included the same description but called the game "base or goal ball" (Carver acknowledged that he was borrowing from the earlier work for many of the games he described). This is the first time 'base' and 'ball' were used together to describe a game featuring a diamond infield (it was not the first appearance of the words themselves, but that's a longer story). It was also the first appearance of the famous woodcut of boys playing in Boston Common. I don't have that book either.

The earliest book I have is The Boy's Book of Sports (1835) which is important because it not only includes the woodcut and a game description but because it specifically calls the game 'base ball' for the first time. It also updates and clarifies the rules: the bases are now run counterclockwise (in earlier books they were run clockwise) and it is the first known use of the terms 'innings' and 'diamond' specifically in reference to baseball.

[The above was paraphrased/copied from David Block's Baseball Before We Knew It which explores the roots of the game and has an extensive bibliography of early works that mention base, ball, or related games such as stool ball and trap ball.]