Who invented baseball? - Ask History Ask History March 27, 2013 By History.com Staff Share this: Google You may have heard that a young man named Abner Doubleday invented the game known as baseball in Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 1839. Doubleday then went on to become a Civil War hero, while baseball became America’s beloved national pastime. Not only is that story untrue, it’s not even in the ballpark. Doubleday was still at West Point in 1839, and he never claimed to have anything to do with baseball. In 1907, a special commission created by the sporting goods magnate and former major league player A.J. Spalding used flimsy evidence—namely the claims of one man, mining engineer Abner Graves—to come up with the Doubleday origin story. Cooperstown businessmen and major league officials would rely on the myth’s enduring power in the 1930s, when they established the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in the village. As it turns out, the real history of baseball is a little more complicated than the Doubleday legend.

References to games resembling baseball in the United States date back to the 18th century. Its most direct ancestors appear to be two English games: rounders (a children’s game brought to New England by the earliest colonists) and cricket. By the time of the American Revolution, variations of such games were being played on schoolyards and college campuses across the country. They became even more popular in newly industrialized cities where men sought work in the mid-19th century. In September 1845, a group of New York City men founded the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club. One of them—volunteer firefighter and bank clerk Alexander Joy Cartwright—would codify a new set of rules that would form the basis for modern baseball, calling for a diamond-shaped infield, foul lines and the three-strike rule. He also abolished the dangerous practice of tagging runners by throwing balls at them. Cartwright’s changes made the burgeoning pastime faster-paced and more challenging while clearly differentiating it from older games like cricket. In 1846, the Knickerbockers played the first official game of baseball against a team of cricket players, beginning a new, uniquely American tradition.

Tags Baseball's Official Historian Explains The Origins Of Our National Pastime : NPR List Price: $26 Introduction Reflecting on the appeal of history in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, heroine Catherine Morland comments, "I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." Indeed. And in no field of American endeavor is invention more rampant than in baseball, whose whole history is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community, and fair play. The game's epic feats and revered figures, its pieties about racial harmony and bleacher democracy, its artful blurring of sport and business — all of it is bunk, tossed up with a wink and a nudge. Yet we love both the game and the flimflam because they are both so . . . American. Baseball has been blessed in equal measure by Lincoln and by Barnum. Miss Austen's novel, written in 1798, but published posthumously twenty years later, is today well known in baseball-history circles not for the passage above but for this one: Mrs.

Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books—or at least books of information. . . . Yet before April 1937, when Robert W. Henderson of the New York Public Library called public attention to this Austen reference to baseball, and to an even earlier woodcut of the game in John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), few Americans knew that English boys and girls had played a game called baseball, whatever its rules may have been. Magnanimously, we had granted the Brits their primacy in cricket; some American cosmopolites might go so far as to acknowledge a playing-fields link between their national game and ours — perhaps, as the early sportswriter Henry Chadwick claimed, through rounders — but baseball, well, that was our game.

A special commission constituted by sporting-goods magnate Albert Goodwill Spalding affirmed in 1908, after nearly three years' purported study of the game's true origin, that baseball was assuredly American for it had been created from the fertile brain of twenty-year old Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. Critics of the commission's methods and conclusions soon made an alternative case for the genius of Alexander Cartwright and the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, founded in New York in 1845. Weary after decades of America's jingoistic rodomontade, the British gallantly departed the field, never having comprehended what the whole fuss was about ("it's just rounders, you know"). Responding to Henderson's conclusion that baseball was "made in England," John Kieran wrote in his April 11, 1937, column for the New York Times: Oh, Abner of the Doubledays in far-off fields Elysian, Your claim to fame is called a foul by later-day decision. Some prying archeologists have gone and found some traces Of baseball footprints ages old in sundry English places.

Dryly, Kieran proposed that "in view of the enjoyment which we in this country derive from baseball, it would be a sporting gesture to let the English inventors know that we are very much obliged to them." However, with publication of the commission's report in the spring of '08, followed shortly by Chadwick's death from complications of a cold aggravated by his ill-advised attendance at a drizzly Opening Day, the contest as to who invented baseball had ceased to be one of national origin. It soon boiled down to a two-man affair, both contestants American. Doubleday, whose dossier bore an official stamp, took the lead over the late-to-the-fair Cartwright and has held it, except among knowledgeable fans, to the present day. Like Henderson's report (the forerunner of his 1947 book Ball, Bat and Bishop), Kieran's commentary amounted to a howl in the wilderness, for the Baseball Hall of Fame had already been designated for Cooperstown as consecration of Doubleday's ingenuity.

Recent scholarship, especially that of David Block in Baseball Before We Knew It, has swung origins interest back to the mother country while affirming Henderson's view that bat-and-ball games are of great variety, antiquity, and geographic diversity, tangled up in the same evolutionary bramble bush from which baseball emerged. In this book we may touch upon some of these variant games, from the banks of the Nile (seker-hemat) to the meadows of medieval England (stoolball) to twentieth-century Finland (pesäpallo), but the story of baseball that fills these pages takes place in America. Decades ago, when I became convinced that the well-worn tales about the rise and flower of the game were largely untrue, I determined to set matters straight . . . in other words, to fashion a history based upon excavation of fresh documentary evidence and to expose the truth. However, as time wore on I found myself more engaged by the lies, and the reasons for their creation, and have sought here not simply to contradict but to fathom them.

And the liars and schemers in this not so innocent age of the game proved to be far more compelling characters than the straight arrows: In the Garden of Eden, after all, Adam and Eve are bores; it is the serpent who holds our attention. Why, I wondered, had so many individuals expended so much energy in trying to shape and control the creation myth of baseball: to return to an Edenic past, real or imagined; to create the legend of a fall from grace, instigated by gamblers? That became the driving question behind this book. Baseball nostalgia, which I had always dismissed as curdled history for the soft of heart and head, now began to have an edge to it. It has turned out that Spalding and Chadwick — like the calculating exponents of Doubleday and Cartwright — were not mere liars and blowhards. They were conscious architects of legend, shapers of national identity, would-be creators of a useful past and binding archetypes (clever lads, noble warriors, despised knaves, sly jesters, wounded heroes, and so on). In short, they were historians as that term once was understood.

They were trying to create a national mythology from baseball, which they identified as America's secular religion because it seemed to supply faith for the faithless and unify them, perhaps in a way that might suit other ends. If in the process of crafting this useful past, certain individuals, events, ball clubs — even competing versions of the game, like those played in New England or Pennsylvania — had to be left along the road in the name of progress, so be it. In The Death of the Past, J. H. Plumb described this earlier model for history as the establishment of "a psychological reality, used for a social purpose: to stress the virtues of courage, endurance, strength, loyalty and indifference to death." If we substitute "injury" for "death" in that formulation, we have a fair definition of the virtues of sport: providing for its players sublimated, graduated danger in preparation for national service, and for its spectators a salutary exposure to risk, through dashed hopes or unsuccessful wagers. The analytical impulse that marks modern historiography is, in Plumb's view, nothing less than an assault on the created ideology, or myths, by which people have given meaning to their institutions and societies.

Large narratives and small pieties are swept away, replaced by skepticism and sometimes the bright if not warming light of truth. The modern reader may ask: Apart from why it may have mattered to so many in the past, why do the origins of baseball matter today? Why does each announcement of a new find—an advertisement for a game of baseball in New York City from 1823, a prohibition against playing it in Pittsfield from 1791, a diary mention of the game in Surrey in 1755 — land on the front page of major newspapers? Because baseball provides us with a family album older and deeper, by many generations, than all but a relative handful of Americans can claim for their own lineage; because the charm of baseball today is in good measure its echo of a bygone age; and because it is gratifying to think we have something lighthearted in common with the harsh lives of our forefathers, going back to the nation's earliest period and likely beyond.

Parson Weems created the tale about a boyish George Washington and a cherry tree ("I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet"), but it is no creation myth to report that the Father of Our Country played a bat-and-ball game called wicket, now vanished but long concurrent with baseball, with the troops at Valley Forge. "The best part of baseball today," Larry Ritter, author of The Glory of Their Times, was fond of saying, "is its yesterdays." The old marketing adage is that in any field there are two positions worth holding: the first and the best. And it is because of baseball's success—the game on the field today is unquestionably superior to that of a century ago— that a special quality of interest pertains to its early years; for it is with institutions as with men, as Mrs.

Schuyler Van Rensselaer wrote a century ago in another context, "the greater their importance in adult life the greater is the interest that attaches to their birth and antecedents, the incidents of their youth, and the influence that molded their spirit and shaped their destinies." More recently, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould observed, "Most of us know that the Great Seal of the United States pictures an eagle holding a ribbon reading e pluribus unum. Fewer would recognize the motto on the other side (check it out on the back of a dollar bill): annuit coeptis—'he smiles on our beginnings.' " All the same, I recognize that I may not presume my readers' familiarity with the themes and plots and players that make baseball's paleolithic period so fascinating to me. Prudence prompts the provision of a scorecard and a bit of a road map, too. As the book's title indicates, this is a serpentine tale, winding from ancient Egypt to Cooperstown on June 12, 1939, with present-day concerns regularly peeping through.

This book honors baseball's road not taken: the Massachusetts version, which was, in many ways, a better game of baseball than the New York game, although the latter triumphed through superior press agentry. Also coming in for examination will be the Philadelphia game, which like its New England sibling disappeared in an instant, more mysteriously than the dinosaurs. Gambling will be seen not as a latter-day pestilence brought upon a pure and innocent game, but instead the vital spark that in the beginning made it worthy of adult attention and press coverage. Among the organized groups that played baseball before the ostensibly original Knickerbockers were the Gotham, New York, Eagle, Brooklyn, Olympic, and Magnolia clubs. The last named came into view only recently, as a ball club composed not of white-collar sorts with shorter workdays and gentlemanly airs but sporting-life characters, from ward heelers to billiard-room operators and bigamists. Why did the game's earliest annalists forget to include this club in its histories?

One might venture to guess that the Magnolias were too unseemly a bunch to have been covered by a fig leaf, so they were simply written out of the Genesis story, which when presented less messily became the stuff of legend. In the words of psychiatrist George E. Vaillant, "the passage of time renders truth itself relative. . . . It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars of us all." And so it was with the rough and ready game of baseball, constructing a legacy in support of its social and business models. Among those lost in the shuffle of Cartwright and Doubleday and Chadwick and Spalding in the first decade of the twentieth century were four other men, each of whom had a better claim to "inventing" the game than any of those named. Of these little-known four fathers only one, a mysterious Mr. Wadsworth, was accorded even a bit part in the drama of the 1908 Special Commission's findings. We will soon enough catch up with him and with the others—Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and William H.

Tucker. Although Doubleday did not start baseball, it may be said that he started the Civil War: The first Confederate shot at Fort Sumter "penetrated the masonry and burst very near my head," he wrote, after which "we took breakfast leisurely"; thus fortified, he "aimed the first gun on our side in reply to the attack." A Sanskrit-reading mystic who corresponded on esoteric matters with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Doubleday never thought to place himself on baseball's pedestal: A bookish sort as a boy, with no taste for athletics, he died more than a decade before anyone thought to credit him with baseball's design. It was Doubleday's unusual credibility as a warrior and as a spiritualist that made him seem, to those with a grand plan, the perfect instrument by which an exogenous religious sect might thoroughly Americanize itself and become a major player in the promised land for all mankind. Doubleday had been named president of the Theosophical Society in 1879 after the departure for India of its founder, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

His apotheosis as father of baseball was engineered with Theosophical Society assistance, particularly that of Spalding's second wife. They were aided immeasurably by the rabbit-out-of-the-hat appearance of elderly mining engineer Abner Graves, whose 1905 testimony to having witnessed Doubleday's brainstorm in 1839, when Graves was five years old and the future military hero was twenty, sealed the deal for generations to come. Like Doubleday, Cartwright did not know he had invented baseball when he died in 1892, one year before his unwitting rival. The muscle massed behind the Doubleday story after the commission report of 1908 prompted grandson Bruce Cartwright Jr. to launch an equally propagandistic plot that yielded for the Knickerbocker Cartwright a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame on which every word of substance is false.

(Alex Cartwright did not set the base paths at ninety feet, the sides at nine men, or the game at nine innings.) And, as has recently been demonstrated, in Monica Nucciarone's biography, grandson Bruce inserted fabricated baseball exploits into a typescript of Alex Cartwright's handwritten Gold Rush journal, which contains no baseball remarks and itself has been judged a forgery. Unraveling this twisted yarn in which various players hoped to shape America's future by imagining its past, we travel to the Theosophical Society compound at Point Loma, California, strategically selected by the society because it was the westernmost part of the continental United States, and thus nearest the Aryan (i.e., ancient Asian) motherland. Along the way we pick up a motley crew of Cuban refugee children, American millionaires and statesmen, utopian dreamers, and the newlywed Spaldings. Baseball historians have treated Albert Spalding as a combination of Daddy Warbucks and Mr. Micawber because of his penchant for both profit and fustian.

("Baseball," he once declared, "is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim, Vigor, Virility.") But Spalding was something of an idealist, too, one who loved the game for its pure amateur spirit, for its joy, for its uplifting qualities. It has been easy to make him out as the architect of the scheme, by turns evil and comic, but at some point during his Point Loma years he may have become its unwitting victim, afflicted with early-onset dementia that left him in thrall to others. Two of his sons thought so, and sued Spalding's widow for twisting his mind and his assets toward the interests of the Theosophists. The plot to steal baseball started with Doubleday and Spalding and a utopian paradise in America's Golden West; it ended with the Theosophists suing each other into near extinction and a Spalding family feud that made headlines for years after the magnate's death in 1915.

"Who controls the past," George Orwell wrote, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." So it has been with baseball. Excerpted from Baseball in the Garden of Eden by John Thorn. Copyright 2011 by John Thorn. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc, NY. Abner Doubleday Abner Doubleday Location of death: Mendham, NJ Cause of death: Heart Failure Executive summary: Didn't invent baseball Military service: US Army (1842-73, to Major General) Abner Doubleday is probably best known as the inventor of baseball, though he was not. In 1907, a panel of baseball experts headed by A. G. Spalding conducted a highly-publicized investigation into the origins of the game, and concluded that Doubleday had written the rules for baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York (where the Baseball Hall of Fame was later constructed). The panel's work, however, was driven more by mythmaking and the desire for good publicity for the sport than by any actual study of history.

Doubleday himself never claimed to have invented or even played baseball, and never mentioned the sport in his diaries, letters, or papers. He grew up near Cooperstown, but his family moved away in 1838, and by 1839, while Doubleday was alleged to have been inventing baseball at Cooperstown, he was a cadet at West Point, about 75 miles away. In truth, the rules modern audiences and players would begin to recognize for the game of baseball were written in 1845 by a committee headed by Alexander Cartwright -- but even by then similar games called "base ball" had been played for decades. Doubleday could not object -- he was already dead when he was chosen as baseball's false founding father -- and he was considered a strong candidate because he was known and respected as a war hero. His military career began in the Mexican and Seminole Indian Wars, and he was second in command at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, when the fort came under Confederate attack with the opening shots of the American Civil War. Doubleday himself gave the order to fire the first Union cannon shot in that war.

He was appointed brigadier general in February 1862, and saw combat in the second battle of Bull Run (30 August 1862) and at Antietam (17 September 1862), before being promoted to Major General in November of that year. He was present at the battles of Fredericksburg (13 December 1862) and Chancellorsville (1-5 May 1863), and he commanded the 3rd Division, I Corps at the Battle of Gettysburg (1-3 July 1863). As an officer he was noted for methodical planning and calm demeanor in the chaos of battle. In 1870 he was stationed in San Francisco, where with three business partners he proposed and received a city franchise for what became the first cable car line in San Francisco. Unable to find the necessary financing, they sold their franchise to a cable manufacturer, Andrew Smith Hallidie , who then constructed the world's first cable car route, San Francisco's Clay Street Hill Railroad. In 1871 Doubleday was placed in command of an all African-American regiment, the 24th U.S. Infantry.

In 1873 he retired to New Jersey, where he became active in the Theosophical Society, a group devoted to the study of spiritualism and the Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian philosophies. In 1878 he became President of the Society's American operations. Doubleday had strong math skills, and worked as a civil engineer before attending West Point. His father, Ulysses Doubleday, was a two-term US Congressman representing New York, and his grandfather, also named Abner Doubleday, served under "Mad" Anthony Wayne in the American Revolution. He does have one valid link to baseball -- Hall of Famer Wade Boggs is Abner Doubleday's seventh cousin. Frank Doubleday , founder of the Doubleday publishing empire, was also a distant cousin. Father: Ulysses Doubleday (US Congressman, b. 15-Dec-1792, d. 10-Mar-1866) Mistress: Hester Donnelly Doubleday (b. 30-Aug-1788, m. 10-Oct-1814, d.

14-Nov-1859) Brother: Thomas Donnelly Doubleday (bookstore owner, b. 18-Feb-1816, d. 9-Mar-1864) Brother: Ulysses Doubleday, Jr. (stock broker, b. 31-Aug-1824, d. 11-Feb-1893) Wife: Mary Hewitt Doubleday (b. circa 1823, m. 1852, d. 13-Mar-1907, no children) High School: Auburn Academy, Cooperstown, NY (1836) Baseball's Creation Myth by Brian Martin · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Sports & Recreations Nonfiction The story about baseball's being invented in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839 by Abner Doubleday served to prove that the U.S. national pastime was an American game, not derived from the English children's game of rounders as had been believed. The tale, embraced by Americans, has long been proven false but to this day, Cooperstown is celebrated as the birthplace of baseball.

The story has captured the hearts of millions. But who spun that tale and why? This book provides a surprising answer about the origins of America's most durable myth. It seems that Abner Graves, who espoused Cooperstown as the birthplace of the game, likely was inspired by another story about an early game of baseball. The stories were remarkably similar, as were the men who told them. For the first time, this book links the stories and lives of Graves, a mining engineer, and Adam Ford, a medical doctor, both residents of Denver, Colorado. While the actual origins of the game of baseball remain subject to debate and study, new light is shed on the source of baseball's durable creation myth.

Adobe PDF eBook 12.7 MB Adobe EPUB eBook 8.5 MB Brian Martin (Author) Clinging to the Myth of Doubleday and Baseball’s Origins - The New York Times The New York Times Baseball |Myth of Baseball’s Creation Endures, With a Prominent Fan Search Continue reading the main story The old chestnut about Abner Doubleday’s inventing baseball in a cow pasture in upstate New York has been so thoroughly debunked that it has taken a position in the pantheon of great American myths, alongside George Washington’s cherry tree, Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed.

So it came as a surprise when a letter surfaced recently on the Internet in which the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bud Selig , wrote an author who inquired of his views on baseball history: “From all of the historians which I have spoken with, I really believe that Abner Doubleday is the ‘Father of Baseball.’ I know there are some historians who would dispute this, though.” The letter touched off ridicule from historians and bloggers and provided fresh legs to an enduring legend that was discredited almost from the moment it was fashioned — in 1908, after the overlords of baseball sought an American creation story for the game and settled on a dead Civil War hero. Some initially thought the letter might be a fraud. Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC anchor who also writes a baseball blog, wrote, “Who knows; maybe this is a faked Selig letter.” Continue reading the main story That was not to be. Pat Courtney, a spokesman for Selig, verified the authenticity of the letter.

He said Selig declined to be interviewed about his views on the history of the game, but in an e-mail, Courtney wrote: “The commissioner is known for being responsive to the many letters he receives each day from fans and is receptive to the many thoughts presented to him. In one such response to a letter that asked him who founded baseball, he twice acknowledged the ongoing debate that exists to a question to which no one knows the answer.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Yet for decades there has been virtually no debate among credible historians about whether Doubleday had any role in the founding of baseball, which most agree evolved incrementally from earlier games of bats and balls in England. “The thing that amazes me is the durability of this idea,” said Lawrence McCray, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the chairman of the origins committee at the Society of American Baseball Research. “You just don’t run into people now who think of this as historically accurate.” The circumstances of the mythmaking have long been embraced as a quirky and colorful chapter of the game’s past. Even the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., the town where Doubleday supposedly invented the game in 1839, treats the story as fiction.

“The Doubleday Myth Is Cooperstown’s Gain” is the headline of an article in a book published this year by the Hall of Fame. “The Doubleday Myth has since been exposed,” Craig Muder, a Hall of Fame official, wrote in the book. “Doubleday was at West Point in 1839, yet ‘The Myth’ has grown so strong that the facts will never deter the spirit of Cooperstown.” Photo Civil War hero Abner Doubleday supposedly invented baseball in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839. Credit Brady National Photographic Art Gallery In fact, according to the baseball historian John Thorn, the only documented connection between Doubleday and baseball is a letter he wrote in 1871, while commanding a regiment of African-American soldiers in Texas, asking his superiors to “purchase baseball implements for the amusement of the men.” Most historians contend that baseball directly evolved from English games like rounders and cricket and that it has even earlier roots in bat and ball games stretching as far back as 2500 B.C. in Egypt, where the pharaohs played a game called seker-hemat.

Instead of denoting one founder of baseball, the historiography has coalesced around a collection of men who advanced the game toward its modern version. Among the most prominent are Alexander Cartwright, credited with developing many rules of the modern game in New York City in the 1840s and with helping to form the New York Knickerbockers, and Henry Chadwick, a pioneering journalist in scorekeeping and statistics. Others, Thorn said, include Daniel Lucius Adams, a Knickerbockers player credited with establishing 90 feet as the distance between bases, and Louis Fenn Wadsworth, credited by some for setting the standards of nine players and nine innings. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy “One of the things that distinguishes baseball from football and basketball is there is no clear inventor of the game,” said Andrew Schiff, who wrote “The Father of Baseball,” a biography of Chadwick.

“Chadwick is called ‘the Father of Baseball’ not because he invented it but because he nurtured the game as it developed.” Thorn is finishing a book about baseball’s origins titled, “Baseball in the Garden of Eden: A Secret History of the Early Game,” scheduled for publication in March. He said Selig’s apparent beliefs were testament to the power of myths in American culture and the connection between baseball and youthful innocence. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “The real question is, why do we hold on to myths?” Thorn said. “Some of the best parts of us as adults are these very things that have survived from childhood, including our idealism.” He added: “It’s merely odd that the commissioner believes this. It is surprising. I don’t think you can mistrust his other judgments.” It’s not the first time Selig has publicly perpetuated the Doubleday myth.

In 2000, while laying a wreath at Arlington National Ceremony — where Doubleday, who achieved heroism on the Gettysburg battlefield, is buried — Selig, according to news reports at the time, said, “It is a profound honor to be at this hallowed resting place to so many American heroes, including baseball’s own Abner Doubleday.” Selig’s visit to the cemetery was noted by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy when he visited Cooperstown a few years ago for his book “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville.” “The only problem is that this history is a myth,” Lévy wrote in his book, “and every year millions of men and women come, like me, to visit a town devoted entirely to the celebration of a myth.” The Doubleday myth arose in the early 1900s when the nation, relatively young and insecure over lack of pedigree, needed to possess the game as uniquely American. In 1905, Albert Spalding, a baseball executive and sporting goods magnate, organized a commission to study the origins of the game.

After reviewing some dubious evidence, three years later the commission declared Doubleday the game’s inventor. The theory was almost immediately debunked in a 1909 article in the magazine Colliers. Since then, the debate has mimicked that of human creation, a never-ending tussle. “We have a peculiar country in which we do not have a national creed, we do not have a king, we have no national set of beliefs,” Thorn said. “Baseball became a secular religion.” A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2010, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Myth of Baseball’s Creation Endures, With a Prominent Fan.

Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Austen heroine aids claim UK invented baseball - CNN.com Austen heroine aids claim UK invented baseball Story Highlights Author claims baseball originated in Britain and traveled to the United States Julian Norridge says American sporting magnate covered up baseball's origin Norridge argues reference in Jane Austen novel supports his hypothesis (CNN) -- Is it a case of British "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice" or just a wrong-headed piece of "Persuasion?" The British help invent baseball before it traveled to America, according to author Julian Norridge. According to author Julian Norridge baseball originated in Britain, and part of his proof comes from a reference in Jane Austen's novel "Northanger Abbey." Norridge, whose book "Can we Have our Balls Back, Please?" focuses on Britain's role in writing the rulebooks for a long list of sports, says Austen mentioned baseball in the opening pages of "Northanger Abbey," which was written in 1797-98.

Norridge says that Austen referenced the sport while introducing her tomboy heroine Catherine Morland, writing: "It was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of 14, to books." He argues in his book that the reference indicates British people were familiar with the sport prior to its supposed invention much later in the United States. "There's no doubt it was being played in Britain in the late 18th century, and equally no doubt that it traveled to America," he writes. Norridge argues evidence of the sport's British origins were covered up by American sports magnate Albert Spalding, who set up a special commission to investigate its origins only to ignore the findings and decide it was invented by General Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York state, in 1839. Doubleday, himself, never claimed any role in the sport's invention and many sports historians have rejected suggestions he played a part. Norridge says the first written evidence of baseball comes from a diary written by William Bray, a teenager from Guildford, Surrey, in 1755.

Team BC Website > Sports > 2015 Western Canada Summer Games > Baseball Photos Historians date the game of baseball back to the Egyptian temples more than 4,000 years ago, where drawings depicting something resembling baseball were found. The most popular theory seems to be that the game was invented by the English and was then brought to America by early settlers. Although historians believed Abner Doubleday to have founded the modern game in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, it was in fact, Alexander Cartwright who published the first list of rules in 1845. The game became very popular in the Northeast U.S., and began to spread across the border to Canada. An early form of baseball was played in Beachville, Ontario, in 1838 and since that moment, baseball has grown in popularity in Canada and has been heralded as Canada’s unofficial summer sport. Baseball is a game that demands blinding speed and explosive power involving individual action within a team sport. It is played everywhere from playgrounds and back alleys, to community fields and state-of-the-art stadiums. Played right, baseball looks like the easiest game in the world.

As quoted in a famous baseball movie from 1988, "This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains." Abner Doubleday | Ryan Kelley by kelleysomnibus | Apr 8, 2014 | Omnibus Monuments | 0 comments Copyright Scott Nelson Baseball season is in full swing here in the United States, despite the chilly weather we’re still seeing in the northeast. This week, we celebrate that great American tradition by paying homage to Abner Doubleday. For many years, Abner Doubleday was considered the inventor of baseball. That story is pure legend. The truth of his life, however, is much more interesting. Doubleday eventually found himself on administrative duty in Washington. He was a staunch supporter of Abraham Lincoln and rode with him on the train to Gettysburg, where Lincoln delivered The Gettysburg Address, one of the key speeches in American history. After the war, Doubleday commanded troops in Texas and San Francisco, where he eventually became president of the American Theosophical Society, whose members included Thomas Edison.

He spent much time writing, eventually penning two major works on the Civil War. Doubleday’s connection to baseball comes from a 1907 report claiming Doubleday invented the sport in a cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. In the years leading up to the report, a vicious debate raged in the United States on the origins of baseball. Had baseball been invented in the United States or was it a variation on a British game called rounders? National League president Abraham G. Mills and Chicago Cubs president Albert Spalding certainly didn’t want to believe the game was British. Sportswriter Henry Chadwick, a native of Britain, believed the game had indeed evolved from rounders. He outlined similarities between the two games in a 1903 article. A commission was formed to research the truth–a committee of men handpicked by Spalding. Enter Abner Graves, an engineer told the Akron Beacon Journal in 1905 that Doubleday had invented the game. Graves said he saw Doubleday diagram the game of a baseball field. Spalding wrote to Graves asking for proof.

Graves told Spalding that no copies of the diagram survived and that almost all of the players were dead. He did, however, send Spalding a diagram he claimed looked just like the one Doubelday had drawn up. That was enough for Spalding, the 1907 report by Mills gave Doubleday–and America–credit for inventing the game. There are some problems with that version of history. Doubleday wasn’t in Cooperstown at all during 1839. He was a cadet at West Point–a first year cadet, to be exact, one who would have rarely been given leave. Doubleday left a prodigious body of written work, with only one mention of baseball–in 1871. Graves, if he did see the diagram, would have been five in 1839. Graves was also committed to an insane asylum as an old man. Mills’ bias was obvious, too. Remember the Theosophical Society? Mills donated money to the organization. Despite evidence to the contrary, the myth is resoundingly resilient.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame was built in Cooperstown, New York in 1939, site of Doubleday’s mythical first game. In 2010, Tim Arango of the New York Times revealed that Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig had written a letter, satating: “I really believe that Abner Doubleday is the ‘Father of Baseball’.” History is forgotten, but myth dies hard…especially when there is money to be made. This week’s statue was photographed by Abner Doubleday’s 5th great-grand nephew, Scott Nelson. The statue stands on Reynolds Avenue. The statue stands nine feet tall on an eleven foot tall granite base. The sculptor was John Massey Rhind. It was dedicated on September 25, 1917 by the State of New York. Search for: Abner Doubleday | Society for American Baseball Research If you can help us improve this player's biography, contact us . Abner Doubleday This article was written by David W.

Anderson and Bert and Emily Gumpert When you examine the life of Abner Doubleday you eventually have to come to the point expressed by classic detective Joe Friday: “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.” Okay, so here are two facts about General Abner Doubleday’s life. First, his military career was lengthy and he “was the highest ranking officer in the Civil War to have been part of so many of the Civil War’s major events.” 1 Second, he did not invent baseball, despite the false assertion from the Mills Commission and others. Abner Doubleday was born at Ballston Spa, Saratoga County, New York, on June 26, 1819, to Ulysses F. Doubleday and Hester (Donnelly) Doubleday. 2 Doubleday’s ancestors participated in the American Revolution; his paternal grandfather fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, served at Valley Forge, and fought in the Battle of Stony Point (New York) in 1779. His maternal grandfather was a messenger for George Washington in the early years of the Revolution.

His father fought in the War of 1812, serving at the naval facility at Sacketts Harbor in New York. 3 He returned to Auburn, New York, after the war. He published newspapers and books and served two terms in the US Congress. 4 In the library at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown is a letter that gives some insight into how Abner Doubleday spent his youth. “I was brought up in a book store and early imbibed a taste for reading. I was fond of poetry and art and much interested in mathematical studies. In my outdoor sports I was a addicted to topographical work and even as a boy amused myself by making maps of the country around my father’s residence which was in Auburn, Cayuga County, New York.” 5 Interesting, there is no mention of baseball in his upbringing. The mythology remains strong today, but most serious baseball historians believe the game comes from England and other ball and bat games in prehistory. 6 Doubleday grew up in Auburn and attended the Cooperstown Classical and Military Academy, studying civil engineering before he was appointed to West Point in 1838. During his first year he stood 30th out of 85 plebes.

In 1839, West Point began issuing grades and standings for students. In his sophomore year Doubleday scored third in Drawing; 21st in Mathematics; 29th in English Grammar and 46th in French. Overall, Doubleday stood number 19 in a class of 76 members; many first-year students did not make it through the plebe year. In his junior year, Doubleday stood 20th in a class of 60 members, scoring 17th in Drawing; 21st in Philosophy; and 27th in Chemistry. He graduated from West Point in 1842 ranking 24th in a class of 56 members on July 1 of that year. His last-year scores were 26th in Engineering; 29th in Ethics; 30th in Infantry Tactics; 32nd in Artillery; and 32nd in Mineralogy and Geology.

During his years at West Point, “he did not leave West Point from August 1838 until graduation in 1842”; 7 he was considered to be a “diligent and thoughtful student, something of a critic,” and was “fond of questions in moral philosophy.” 8 Doubleday was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in the 3rd Artillery and was sent to Fort Johnson in North Carolina as his first assignment. 9 Doubleday’s first combat came during the Mexican War. Despite his opposition to the war, 10 he volunteered to fight. He began the war as a supply officer but applied for and received an artillery posting. 11 He was in the fight from 1846 to 1848, and fought at the Battle of Monterey (September 21-23, 1846) and at the Rincouda Pass during the Battle of Buena Vista. After the conflict with Mexico, Doubleday returned to Texas. As a lieutenant of the 1st Artillery, Doubleday was involved in the hostilities against the Apaches from 1854 to 1855 on the Texas border.

In 1858 he posted to Florida. According to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., Doubleday’s activities involved mapping the Everglades and the areas that became the cities of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, plus planning for roads and swamp drainage. 12 Doubleday was posted to the garrison at Fort Moultrie at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1858, an assignment that had a huge influence on his military career. 13 In the 1850s there was a huge split in the Army over slavery. Doubleday was a supporter of abolition and voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860. 14 Most other officers either supported slavery or supported variations between state’s rights or other alternatives in support or opposition to slavery. In short, the Army’s stance toward slavery was as divided as it was in the rest of the country. Before the Civil War began, Doubleday noted that Charleston was not a pleasant place to be, commenting, “Almost every public assemblage was tinctured with treasonable sentiments and toasts against the flag were always warmly applauded.” 15 His service against the Confederacy began where the war began, at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.

Fort Moultrie had been abandoned after South Carolina seceded, and its garrison was moved to Fort Sumter. There, Doubleday was second in command to Major Robert Anderson, who was from Kentucky and was from a slave-owning family. Major Anderson remained in the Union Army, and Doubleday remarked that he was in a cruel situation. 16 The Southerners opened fire on Sumter during the early morning hours of April 12, and Anderson offered only token resistance. Doubleday fired the Union’s first cannon shot but the shot did no damage and on April 14 Fort Sumter surrendered. Under the rules of engagement, the Fort Sumter garrison was allowed to vacate the fortress. Doubleday was transferred to command the garrison at Fort Hamilton in New York. 17 Promoted to major, Doubleday served with the 17th Infantry in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and in the defenses of Washington from September 1861 to May 1862. During this time he was promoted to brigadier general of U.S. Volunteers.

His troops fought in the Second Battle of Manassas August 29-30, then in the Battle of South Mountain in Maryland on September 14. In both battles Doubleday’s men acquitted themselves well. 18 South Mountain was the precursor to Antietam, the bloodiest one-day battle of the war. Doubleday was in the midst of heavy fighting in the Corn Field and West Woods. 19 Late in the battle, Doubleday was wounded when a shell exploded under his horse’s nose, causing the rider and the horse to run over steep rocks. Doubleday received some bruises and could not hold the reins of a horse for a long time. 20 Doubleday’s bravery and that of his troops at Antietam earned him promotion to major general of U.S. Volunteers in the Army of the Potomac. He saw action at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862 and Chancellorsville May 2-4.

By the third year of the Civil War, Doubleday was a reliable general and his biographer Thomas Barthel describes him this way: “He has never been given credit he deserves for his actions in the Civil War or later because he was not one of the boys. He was not glamorous. … Seen not as a foolhardy soldier but as a steadfast one, many times in the future Doubleday would be asked to anchor a line and protect the flank of a large body of soldiers. This reputation was not glamorous. But Doubleday was not a man to worry about his appearance; rather, his concern would be his obligations to the men in his command.” 21 It was at Gettysburg that Doubleday and his troops were involved in the turning point of the Civil War. Some historians make the argument that he kept Cemetery Ridge as part of the Federal lines during the first day’s fighting. Doubleday had a number of West Point classmates who served in the Civil War, including John Newton and John Pope.

Newton, who was number one in his class, relieved General Doubleday as commander of the I Corps during the Battle of Gettysburg, 22 and Doubleday served under Pope in the Union defeat at Second Manassas in August 1862. 23 Several members of Doubleday’s class served with the Confederate army, including Daniel H. Hill, 24 Richard Anderson, Lafayette McLaws, and James Longstreet, all of whom fought at Gettysburg. 25 In command of a division in the I Corps, Doubleday was among the first to see action in the battle. He assumed command of the corps after John F. Reynolds was killed, and his troops fought well but had to withdraw to Cemetery Hill. During the first day’s battle Doubleday’s troops suffered nearly 65 percent casualties, but also blunted the onslaught of troops under Confederate Generals Harry Heth and Robert Rodes. 26 Doubleday believed he would assume command of the I Corps, but the commander of the Army of the Potomac, George Meade, gave the command to John Newton.

Doubleday never forgave Meade, and his career with the Army of the Potomac was over. 27 Allen C. Guelzo, in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, writes, “The written update (General John) Hancock sent back to Meade from Gettysburg included a brief statement – “Howard says that Doubleday’s command gave way” – which became fixed in Meade’s mind as proof that Doubleday had lost all control of I Corps and somehow caused the collapse of both the I and the XI Corps. … In the polarized political atmosphere of the Army of the Potomac, it suited Meade to believe that this constituted a very good reason to yank backward one of the better-known Republican abolitionists in the army.” 28 On the third day of the battle Doubleday’s troops were stationed on Cemetery Ridge and helped fight off Pickett’s Charge. In a letter to his wife he discussed the battle: “The most awful battle of the War occurred yesterday. … They then attacked near my position opening with from 100 to 150 pieces of artillery.

… I was hit and pitched over my horse’s neck by a piece of shell which struck me in the back of the neck. … Luckily I was hit squarely by the smooth round surface. Had the jagged part struck first it would have killed me.” 29 Doubleday was assigned to the defense of Washington, and his last combat was in fighting off Confederate General Jubal Early during raids in 1864. Prior to that he was present when Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. 30 Mustering out of the Union volunteer service in late August 1865, he became a colonel in the regular army and was sent to California, where he helped get a charter for the first cable car railway in San Francisco. 31 In 1871 Doubleday was in Texas, where he commanded the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment. This is where Abner Doubleday and baseball were linked for the only time.

Doubleday asked his superiors to “purchase baseball implements for the amusement of the men.” 32 After an illness, and after being bitten by a copperhead 33 on the way to Brownsville, Texas, Doubleday retired from the Army in 1873. He and his wife, Mary, retired to Mendham, New Jersey. They had no children. He died on January 26, 1893. Mary died on March 13, 1907. They are buried at Arlington National Cemetery. 34 So what about Abner Doubleday’s “invention” of baseball? No serious historian of baseball believes Doubleday established the rules of baseball, but the myth of Doubleday still persists to some degree. In 1905 Abraham G. Mills was appointed by Albert G. Spalding to head a commission to determine when and where baseball began. Spalding was engaged in a dispute with Henry Chadwick. The British-born Chadwick believed the game evolved from the English game of rounders.

Spalding, an exemplar of hyper-American nationalism prevalent in the early years of the 20th century, believed baseball was invented in America, by an American. Mills had been president of the National League from 1882 to 1884. Other members of his commission were Morgan G. Bulkeley, the National League’s first president; Arthur P. Gorman, a former player and president of the Washington Base Ball Club; Nicholas E. Young, president of the National League from 1884 to 1902; Alfred J. Reach, a former Philadelphia Athletics player and the owner of Reach Sporting Goods; George Wright, a former player with the Cincinnati Red Stockings; and James E. Sullivan, president of the Amateur Athletic Union. 35 The commission’s decision, released in 1908, stated that Abner Doubleday invented baseball at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. This flies in the face of the fact that Doubleday was a plebe at West Point at that time, was only 20 years old, and had never left West Point from August 1838 until his graduation in 1842.

“The myth was embellished by the fact that Doubleday was a Civil War general. That, coupled with the dubious conclusion that baseball had no connection to any foreign game, gave the owners the ammunition they needed to promote baseball as the national pastime.” 36 While that helped the owners and eventually led to establishment of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, the claims of the Mills Commission were spurious and based on evidence that today would not stand up in any court. The commission based its decision on a letter to a newspaper by Abner Graves of Denver, who claimed he had seen Doubleday making drawings on baseball. He said he had attended school with Doubleday. Having acquired the “evidence” they needed, no one bothered to check further with Graves. No one felt it important that Graves was 5 years old in 1839 and Doubleday was already at West Point. Finally, Graves was not well; he wound up killing his wife and spent his remaining years in an asylum. 37 Abner Doubleday was a very religious man, who never drank or used profane language, and whose interests were wide, including mathematics, engineering, literature, military science, and sports.

If Doubleday were still alive he would likely wonder why his name is connected with baseball and not with his participation in the Civil War battles including Fort Sumter, Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. 38 David W. Anderson is author of "More Than Merkle" and "You Can’t Beat the Hours," and has spoken at the Seymour Conference and SABR conventions. He lives in Olathe, Kansas, with his wife, Judy. Bert Gumpert was an official scorer for the New York Yankees and a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America. He died on December 23, 1978. Emily Gumpert assisted with this project as well. Thanks to Mark Pattison for providing information on Gumpert’s work on Doubleday. Notes 1 Letter to Bert Gumpert (1899-1978) from Alan C. Aimone, military history librarian, US Military Academy Library, February 17, 1977. Gumpert’s work on Doubleday supplies much of this biography.

He was an official scorer for the New Yankees but was also involved in the Baseball Writers Association of America. He helped found the Bronx Historical Society and was also involved with the Civil War Society and the Revolutionary War Roundtable in New York City. Research on Gumpert’s work was provided by Mark Pattison. 2 Biographic information on Abner Doubleday is from Bert Gumpert, who was working on a Doubleday biography for the Civil War Roundtable of New York. 3 Thomas Barthel, Abner Doubleday: A Civil War Biography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., 2010), 7-8. 4 Bert Gumpert, Abner Doubleday (unpublished manuscript). 5 Gumpert, Abner Doubleday. 6 Tim Arango, “Myth of Baseball’s Creation Endures, With a Prominent Fan,” New York Times, November 20, 2010.

Question: Which sport was, allegedly, invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839?
Answer: BASEBALL