an amateur social and athletic club organized by Alexander Cartwright on Manhattan's (Lower) East Side in 1842, largely to play "base ball" according to written rules, the first organized team in baseball history; on June 19, 1846 the New York Knickerbockers played the first game of "base ball" organized under those rules, in Hoboken, New Jersey, and were trounced, 23–1. The Knickerbocker name stayed with the team even after it moved its base of operations to Elysian Fields at Hoboken, N.J. in 1846. The baseball link may have prompted Casey Stengel to joyously exclaim, "It's great to be back as the manager of the Knickerbockers!" when he was named pilot of the newborn New York Mets in 1961. Hence the locally-brewed "Knickerbocker Beer" brewed by Jacob Ruppert, the first sponsors of the TV show Tonight!; hence the gossip columnist "Cholly Knickerbocker", the pen name of Igor Cassini; hence the extremely high-toned Knickerbocker Club (still in a neo-Georgian mansion on Fifth Avenue at 62nd Street, which was founded in 1871 when some members of the Union Club became concerned that admission policies were not strict enough); and hence the New York Knicks, whose corporate name is the "New York Knickerbockers". The Knickerbocker name was an integral part of the New York scene when the Basketball Association of America granted a charter franchise to the city in the summer of 1946. As can best be determined, the final decision to call the team the "Knickerbockers" was made by the club's founder, Ned Irish. The team is now generally referred to as the Knicks. Use in sporting endeavors Knickerbockers have been popular in other sporting endeavors, particularly golf, rock climbing, cross-country skiing, fencing and bicycling. In cycling, they were standard attire for nearly 100 years, with the majority of archival photos of cyclists in the era before World War I showing men wearing knickerbockers tucked into long socks. They remained fairly popular in Britain (where they were called "breeks" or "trews") in the years between World War I and World War II, but eventually were eclipsed in popularity by racing tights, even among the vast majority of cyclists who never raced. Invariably referred to as "knickers" in the US, they lived on as a just-past-the-knee variant of racing tights reserved for colder-weather riding. Knickers are still worn as part of the conventional uniform in fencing. Knickerbockers are often worn in baseball as pants,