DATE: 1839 (by tradition).
WHAT IT IS: A ball associated with the alleged inventor of baseball, Abner Doubleday.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is a small baseball stuffed with compressed fabric. Its cover is a single piece of brown leather cut into “petals,” which are sewn together around the stuffing; some of the seams are coming apart.
America loves a good myth. Among its most venerable apocryphal stand-bys are that the young George Washington declared “I cannot tell a lie” when asked by his father if he had chopped down the cherry tree; and that Abraham Lincoln composed his famous address on the train to Gettysburg. Curiously, these nineteenth-century fabrications (which have their origins, respectively, in Mason Locke Weems’s 1800 The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington, and spurious eyewitness accounts of passengers on the same train on which the sixteenth president rode to Gettysburg) have stubbornly persisted to the present. The story of the invention of America’s national pastime, baseball, also has a fanciful provenance, crafted not to honor a real early architect of the sport but to meet the needs of a later time. But what do the Spanish-American War, a deranged wife killer, a six-year-old boy, and a ragged old ball found in an attic trunk have to do with the fabrication that the sport of baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday?
The story of the origin of baseball has for generations been wrapped in the legend that Abner Doubleday conceived the sport in Cooperstown, New York, some eleven years prior to the midpoint of the nineteenth century. The myth received its substantiation not from any records or eyewitness accounts of the day, but in the tenuous findings of a committee formed in the first decade of the twentieth century, validated and sanctioned years later by a somewhat mysterious discovery. Consequently, people have commonly accepted the notion that while baseball evolved from previous forms of ball games, it was Abner Doubleday, the nineteenth-century West Point cadet who went on to become a general in the American Civil War, who formulated the rules by which modern-day baseball is played. The Doubleday creation myth says much about how falsehoods enter the history books and deserves examination.
As a game played with simple equipment, essentially just a bat and ball, modern-day baseball indeed has antecedents that stretch back to some of the earliest human societies. The sport’s evolution through the centuries was influenced by many factors, including culture and social mores.
The basic physical elements of baseball are throwing, hitting, catching, and running. These elements were constituents of some of the earliest human games. The Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, among other societies, are all known to have had stick-and-ball games; later, the Mayans, in the Western Hemisphere, also played such games.
References to stick-and-ball games can be found in written sources of the Middle Ages, including the 1086 Domesday Book. In France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was an Easter tradition to play stick-and-ball games, but it is not clear why.
Civil War general Abner Doubleday may have been an authoritative commander on the battlefield, but he didn't invent the baseball field.
On the family tree of stick-and-ball games, cricket, which developed in the Middle Ages, is a near relative to baseball. It is a field game with eleven players on each side, using bats (with a blade), a ball, and two wickets (each formed by three stumps and two bails, or pieces of wood, across their top); runs are scored when the batter, standing at a wicket, hits the ball thrown to him by the bowler and dashes to the wicket across from him before any of the fielders spread out on the field can return the ball to the wicket. Cricket itself is a descendant of ancient games, and although a national sport of England, its origins are in dispute; some say it developed in France.
Because under its old rules a cricket match required a great deal of time to play, in the British tradition the sport was an aristocratic pastime. Indeed, by the early 1800s, a proper cricket match could take a good three days to play.
By the early eighteenth century another stick-and-ball game called “base-ball” was played in England, but its rules are not clear. It was undoubtedly played by children; in 1744, England’s first specialized children’s publisher, John Newberry, issued a collection of rhymed poems accompanied by woodcut illustrations about children’s games, including base-ball, entitled A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. The first of two publications of the book in America occurred in 1762, when Hugh Gaine, a New York printer, published the book with the title A Little Pretty Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly. Under a woodcut picturing young players wearing hats, standing at posts spaced apart in the form of a triangle, was a quatrain, titled “Base-Ball,” that described how the game was played:
The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy
To the next destin’d Post
And then Home with Joy.
A feature of many of these games was that runners were not tagged but put out by defensive players who threw the ball at them, an action called “plugging” or “stinging.” These games were sometimes referred to as base-ball, and they certainly do represent the beginnings of American baseball.
For the most part, stick-and-ball games were the domain of children in colonial America, but beginning in the late 1700s older teenagers and young adults took up playing ball from time to time. George Ewing reports in his diary that as a soldier at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in 1778, he “exercised in the afternoon in the intervals played at base.” Princeton College students played “baste ball” in 1786, and enthusiasm for the sport only seemed to grow from there. In what may have been the first American college campus craze, from about 1810 to 1830, students at Brown, Bowdoin, and other eastern colleges couldn’t get enough of baseball-type games.
A nineteenth-century illustration of the "New York Game," as established by the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in 1845. The picture shows the configuration of the field and the position of the players (note the second and third basemen standing on the bases). The pitcher is shown throwing underhand; it wasn't until 1884 that pitching was changed to overhand.
What’s remarkable about this phenomenon in these pre-Victorian times in class-conscious America is that men felt comfortable playing the game. In many localities, the notion that adults would spend considerable time playing a game like baseball would have seemed childish or odd, and while the players would not have been arrested or punished, they did risk being castigated by their peers. Stick-and-ball games were banned at Princeton on the grounds that they were “dangerous as well as beneath the propriety of a gentleman.”
Small towns also banned ball playing. In 1816 the towns of Cooperstown, New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts, both passed ordinances prohibiting the playing of ball in the streets (at Cooperstown the ban applied to specific streets). Ball playing could result in horses being frightened or a window being broken, but it may also be said that sometimes when youths do things that annoy adults, the latter find ways to make them illegal.
Illustrations of baseball-type games continued to feature children even as late as the 1830s, which may indicate that mainstream adults continued to view stick-and-ball games as children’s games. There was rounders, for instance, a children’s game popular in England in which a person would throw a ball to a side of three or four batters, and whoever hit the ball would try to run to a base and then return home before a fielder could retrieve it and throw it at him. If he succeeded, he earned a run; if not, he exchanged places with the fielder who hit him. There were many variations of this involving more bases, but this was the basic format of the game. There was also One o’Cat (with its variations) and its offshoot, town ball. In One o’Cat, Two o’Cat, Three o’Cat, and Four o’Cat, players hit the ball, ran to bases, then tried to return to the original batter’s base to score runs, the particular game played determining the number of bases used. In town ball, players divided into teams and used a small bat to hit the ball to opponents waiting in the playing field. There were other games too, such as barn ball and goal ball, in which balls, bats, and sticks were often makeshift objects, and the rules and playing fields varied according to the players. A feature of many of these games was that runners were “plugged.”
Although children’s books about stick-and-ball games continued to be published in America, men began to organize into clubs to play town ball and other precursors of modern baseball. Players were sometimes hungry for a challenge, as evidenced by this newspaper article that appeared in the July 12, 1825, edition of the Delhi (New York) Gazette:
The undersigned, all residents of the new town of Hamden, with the exception of Asa C. Howland, who has recently removed into Delhi, challenge an equal number of persons of any town in the County of Delaware, to meet them at any time at the house of Edward B. Chace, in said town, to play the game of BASS-BALL, for the sum of one dollar per game. If no town can be found that will produce the required number, they have no objection to play against any selection that can be made from the several towns in the county.
The names of nine men were printed under the article. Most were relatively young British émigrés who had come to the United States after the War of 1812, some quite recently.
Baseball remained a local pastime until September 1845, when a group of town ball players organized the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. The team sprouted from some of the members’ previous association with a volunteer fire department. The volunteer firefighters were middle-class men in their twenties and thirties who worked in Manhattan in such professions as customs brokering, pharmacy, medicine, legal services, and banking. The fire department was a way for these young men to offer community service, but it also provided a social outlet. After meetings the men would pursue some form of amusement, such as playing ball, and then dine.
The fire company disbanded in the early 1840s, but some of the members continued to play ball, and over time others joined them. The men met regularly to play ball at different sites in the New York City area, and around 1844 they even started taking a horse ferry (in which a horse on deck turned the wheel to move the ferry) across the Hudson River to Hoboken, New Jersey, where they would walk along the shore for about a mile to the Elysian Fields to play. A rules committee later formed, and on September 23, 1845, the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club adopted twenty rules for the playing of baseball.
In June 1846, the New York Knickerbockers played their first match. They suffered a humiliating defeat—according to one account the pitcher on the opposing team was an experienced cricket bowler—and did not play another team until five years later. But other teams formed in the interim, and by the mid-1850s there were more than twenty-five clubs, many founded by former New York Knickerbockers, which played in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx, using the New York Knickerbocker rules. Some of these clubs were proficient ball teams and drew crowds of a thousand or more people. The New York Knickerbockers reemerged as a competitor around 1851, and while their record was not outstanding, they left an enduring legacy: their 1845 set of twenty rules became the basis for modern-day baseball.
Among the rules that became known as the “New York Game” were:
The Knickerbocker rules contained certain innovations, such as creating foul territory, and were important in another respect: they made baseball more advanced by eliminating plugging.
In May 1858 ten clubs playing town ball in and around the Boston area met at Dedham, Massachusetts, to draw up a set of rules. There was disagreement in a number of areas, and the players discussed meeting at a later date to address them, but apparently never did. Still, they adopted twenty-one “town base ball” rules that became known as the “Massachusetts Game,” among them:
The Massachusetts version of baseball was very popular in the Boston area, but as the New York Game spread and increased in popularity in the Civil War period, town ball essentially fell by the wayside, and the Massachusetts Game disappeared. To the people of mid-nineteenth-century America, the New York Game was superior because it was a more orderly game, and the ball was not thrown at the runner.
In America’s pre-Civil War era, baseball continued in popularity, and its rules became more refined. In New York City, a group of clubs met and decided that games would be played for nine innings, instead of the seven innings proposed by the members of the New York Knickerbocker club. In 1859 the first intercollegiate baseball game took place: Amherst College faced Williams College on neutral territory at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The game was played under the rules adopted the previous year at Dedham.
Baseball almost from the beginning of its evolution as a professional sport seemed to be cast as an American game, as something that expressed American ideals and values and was uniquely American. The notion that baseball had evolved from British rounders was by the 1870s and 1880s rejected by some American authorities, who seemed determined to believe that somehow an American had brought the game into being.
In the late 1850s, Henry Chadwick, an English expatriate who wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle, helped form the National Association of Ball Players. Chadwick, who was a cricket player and covered cricket matches, made many contributions to baseball, including creating the box score and publicizing the sport as it was taking shape. Here’s Chadwick conveying the popularity of the game in an article published in the New York Clipper on October 26, 1861, about a ball game played five days earlier in Hoboken, New Jersey:
The game of base ball is, as our readers are for the most part aware, an American game exclusively, as now played, although a game somewhat similar has been played in England for many years, called “rounders,” but which is played more after the style of the Massachusetts game. New York, however, justly claims to being the originators of what is termed the American Game, which has been so improved in all its essential points by them, and its scientific points so added to, that it does not stand second either in its innate excellencies, or interesting phrases, to any national game of any country in the world, and is every way adapted to the tastes of all who love athletic exercises in this country.
Chadwick’s enthusiasm for baseball being an “American Game” would diminish over time, and he would later figure prominently in the debate over whether baseball was in fact English or American in origin. Chadwick and two others of his time, Alexander Cartwright, who spearheaded the founding of the New York Knickerbockers, and Harry Wright, a world-class cricket player who was one of the leading members of baseball’s first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, would become known as “the three fathers of baseball.”*
As America was undergoing a vast change in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, baseball—in the New York style—became established as the country’s national pastime. In 1874 American baseball players went on an exhibition tour to Great Britain, and in 1889 embarked on a worldwide tour. The latter was organized by Albert G. Spalding, the sporting goods executive who had been a star pitcher for the Chicago White Stockings and helped establish the National League.
Spreading the national pastime was the American thing to do, and Spalding, during the 1888 global tour, drove the concept home. In masterful public relations stunts, baseball players competed in front of the Egyptian pyramids and posed on top of the Sphinx. Boys on the streets in Morocco were photographed holding baseball bats just like red-blooded American kids. Indeed, Spalding dispensed bats to young street urchins with missionary zeal (of course, as a sporting goods manufacturer, Spalding had something to gain personally by popularizing baseball). As Spalding would later write in his high-spirited baseball book:
All America has come to regard Base Ball as its very own, to be known throughout the civilized world as the great American National Game. … Ever since its establishment in the hearts of the people as the foremost of field sports, Base Ball has “followed the flag.” It followed the flag to the front in the sixties, and received then an impetus which has carried it to half a century of wondrous growth and prosperity. It has followed the flag to Alaska, where, under the midnight sun, it is played on Arctic ice. It has followed the flag to the Hawaiian Islands, and at once supplanted every other form of athletics in popularity. It has followed the flag to the Philippines, to Porto Rico and to Cuba, and wherever a ship floating the Stars and Stripes finds anchorage today, somewhere on a nearby shore the American National Game is in progress.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century was an exciting period in America, with many revolutionary American inventions altering the very fabric of society. Beginning with Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876, Americans over the next twenty-five or thirty years introduced to the world the phonograph, the incandescent lamp, the motion picture, the gasoline automobile, and the airplane. America even had its own indigenous music in ragtime, the jaunty, syncopated tunes that swept the country. Political tensions were simmering in Europe, but that was too far away to be of much interest.
On February 15, 1898, an event happened that would bring American nationalism to a fever pitch. In the harbor of Havana in Spanish-controlled Cuba, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up. More than 250 American sailors were killed,* and their countrymen refused to consider the explosion an accident. They turned their wrath on Spain, incited in part by Spain’s oppressive treatment of Cubans and driven by the strident yellow journalism of some influential American newspapers that had been clamoring for war.
Despite Spain’s willingness to reform its policies in Cuba, the United States sent its troops into action. In Cuba and the Philippines, the Americans swiftly wiped out the Spanish naval fleets. The Spanish-American War wasn’t much of a war, but it created a newly fervent patriotism. The last time Americans had been at war, it was among themselves; now they had a common enemy and couldn’t get enough of the war. They showed their support by parading through city streets with the Stars and Stripes held high, and their passion rescued a new entertainment medium called moving pictures (by this time the novelty had worn off) as they flocked to theaters to view footage of American soldiers shellacking the Spanish villains. It didn’t matter that many of the battles were staged on sets and in water tanks in New York City and New Jersey.
Americans took pride in their victory over an Old World power. Spain had attacked an American ship in Cuban waters—and even if it hadn’t, it was still the enemy. An attack on an American institution caused outrage. An attack on an American institution on American soil would surely draw the unbridled wrath of the country. Such an “attack” came some years later from Henry Chadwick.
Chadwick, the British expatriate sportswriter, penned a piece about the origin of baseball that ran in the 1903 Baseball Guide published by Albert Spalding. In his essay, Chadwick traced the history of modern baseball to the British game of rounders. The piece set off a firestorm of discontent among baseball’s elite, and the next year Spalding in his annual guide countered Chadwick’s assertion and proposed a commission to investigate and report on the origin of baseball.
Known as the Mills Commission after its head, A. G. Mills, who in the 1880s had served as president of the National League, the committee consisted additionally of two U.S. senators, Arthur Gorman of Maryland and Morgan Bulkeley of Connecticut, both former baseball executives; two businessmen, Bostonian George Wright and Philadelphian Alfred Reach, both former ballplayers (George Wright was the brother of famous baseball player Harry Wright); James Sullivan, the president of the Amateur Athletic Union; and Nicholas Young, a longtime secretary of the National League. All baseball insiders, the members of the Mills Commission were not well suited to conduct a scholarly investigation, and in fact did not go about their inquiry with great precision. The commission ran advertisements in sports publications inviting anyone who knew anything about the early days of baseball to write in. The most significant correspondence received was deemed to be from a mining engineer from Colorado named Abner Graves.*
Graves wrote that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. The Mills Commission asked him to provide additional details, and Graves responded. According to Graves, Doubleday had sketched out a diamond-shaped playing field and introduced certain rules that had altered the game of town ball to create the new game that became known as baseball. Graves gave the impression that he and a bunch of boys had engaged in disorderly games of ball (played with bats, balls, and bases) at Cooperstown, and that one day Abner Doubleday had shown up with rules for their field—a ninety-foot playing field shaped like a diamond with the bases set out at different positions. Graves’s testimony did not offer much in the way of concrete proof; it was the recollection of one man some sixty-five years after the game’s alleged inception.
The trouble was, Graves assumed that the Abner Doubleday who came to Cooperstown was the same Abner Doubleday who had become a famous major general in the Civil War. Graves did go to school in Cooperstown with an Abner Doubleday, who was about the same age as Graves. However, this Abner Doubleday, the son of a Bruce Doubleday and a cousin of the major general, was an unlikely inventor of baseball in 1839, as he was only about six years old at the time.
Abner Doubleday the major general was born in 1819 in Ballston Spa, New York, near Schenectady, about a two-day ride at the time from Cooperstown. Abner’s father was a bookseller, and when Abner was young his family moved to Auburn, New York, about eighty miles west of Cooperstown.
Abner grew up in Auburn, and then attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. No records have surfaced of this Abner Doubleday ever having been in Cooperstown, and indeed he probably never visited the town. Doubleday was a student at West Point in 1839, and it is unlikely that he would have been able to take time off from his studies at the military academy to invent and play baseball. Doubleday graduated from West Point in 1842, and then his military career went into full gear; he entered the Civil War as a major and became famous for firing the first cannon shot in the Civil War on the Union side at Fort Sumter. There are no known contemporary accounts of Doubleday having played baseball or invented rules for it.
Graves offered testimony to the Mills Commission but provided no concrete evidence supporting his assertions. When the Mills Commission asked for more information, Graves provided precise details almost seven decades after the event. It is possible that Graves, seeking attention, embellished his story for the fame he would earn from his purported association with the inventor of baseball, or even that he was manipulated to a degree by the Mills Commission. Graves may have initially referred to the younger Abner Doubleday as the inventor of baseball. Six years old is certainly too young to have invented sophisticated rules for a game like baseball, but not to have played it. So many years removed, Graves may have thought someone he played ball with had provided rules for the game, the name of his boyhood acquaintance Abner Doubleday then popping into his mind. When the Mills Commission members heard the name Abner Doubleday, of course they would think it was the famous major general of the Civil War and seize upon it being that Doubleday.
The Mills Commission accepted Graves’s testimony of Doubleday as baseball’s inventor. What could have been more American than baseball, a game played during the Civil War, invented by a soldier in the war, and even the soldier who fired the cannon shot that began the war? As Albert Spalding would later write about Doubleday:
The founder of our National Game became a Major General in the United States Army! The sport had its baptism when our country was in the preliminary agonies of a fratricidal conflict. Its early evolution was among the men, both North and South, who, during the war of the sixties, played the game to relieve the monotony of camp life in those years of melancholy struggle.
Lending support to Graves’s claim was a man named Curry, a past president of the original New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, who stated that one day one of the team’s members, a man named Wadsworth, had brought a diagram showing the layout of the ball field. It so happened that Wadsworth had family from upstate New York, and A. G. Mills conjectured that Wadsworth had learned to play baseball the Doubleday way upstate and then taught Doubleday’s version of the game to the Knickerbockers. Wadsworth presumably worked in a customs house, and Mills tried unsuccessfully to track down Wadsworth’s records, which, he believed, would have shown him to have lived in Cooperstown.
Abner Graves’s account was the Mills Commission’s best case for American authorship of the game. The mining engineer seemed to the Mills Commission to be a reliable witness, but not much was known about him—or his mental stability. Of course it couldn’t be known at this time that some two decades later Graves would have a dispute with his second wife over the sale of their house. He wanted to sell it, she didn’t. She owned the house, but that didn’t matter to Graves. He murdered his wife and spent the rest of his days in an insane asylum.
At the end of 1907, the Mills Commission declared in a report (published in the 1908 Baseball Guide) that baseball was a sport indigenous to the United States with no ties to other games; and that Abner Doubleday, the American major general, had invented the sport of baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. Although the findings were bolstered by an alleged witness, Graves, they still lacked conclusive evidence that would confirm Doubleday as the originator of the sport. That evidence would come (in tenuous form) twenty-seven years later, in 1934.
Indeed, the Mills Commission was the final arbiter in the debate over the origin of baseball. In a letter of December 30, 1907, to James E. Sullivan, Secretary of the Special Base Ball Commission, A. G. Mills wrote:
I cannot say that I find myself in accord with those who urge the American origin of the game as against its English origin, as contended for by Mr. Chadwick, on “patriotic grounds”. In my opinion we owe much to our Anglo-Saxon kinsmen for their example which we have too tardily followed, in fostering healthful field sports generally, and if the fact could be established, by evidence, that our national game, “Base Ball”, was devised in England, I do not think that it would be any the less admirable nor welcome on that account. …
Until my perusal of this testimony, my own belief had been that our game of Base Ball, substantially as played today, originated with the Knickerbocker Club of New York, and it was frequently referred to as the “New York Ball Game”.
… In the last analysis, [Chadwick’s] contention is based chiefly upon the fact that, substantially, the same kind of implements are employed in the game of Base Ball as in the English game of “Rounders” to which he refers; for if the mere tossing or handling of some kind of a ball, or striking it with some kind of a stick, could be accepted as the origin of our game, then Father Chadwick would certainly have to go far back of Anglo-Saxon civilization,—beyond Rome, beyond Greece, at least to the palmy days of the Chaldean Empire! Nor does it seem to me that he can any more successfully maintain the argument because of the employment, by the English school boy of the past, of the implements or materials of the game.
… In the interesting and pertinent testimony for which we are indebted to Mr. A. G. Spalding, appears a circumstantial statement by a reputable gentleman, according to which the first known diagram of the diamond, indicating positions for the players was drawn by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839. Abner Doubleday subsequently graduated from West Point and entered the regular army where, as Captain of Artillery, he sighted the first gun fired on the Union side (at Fort Sumpter [sic]) in the Civil War. Later still, he was in command of the Union army at the close of the first day’s fight in the battle of Gettysburg, and he died full of honors at Mendham, N.J., in 1893. … In the days when Abner Doubleday attended school in Cooperstown, it was a common thing for two dozen or more of school boys to join in a game of ball. Doubtless, as in my later experience, collisions between players in attempting to catch the batted ball were frequent, and injury due to this cause, or to the practice of putting out the runner by hitting him with the ball, often occurred.
I can well understand how the orderly mind of the embryo West Pointer would devise a scheme for limiting the contestants on each side, and allotting them to field positions, with a certain amount of territory; also substituting the existing method of putting out the base runner for the old one of plugging him with the ball.
I am also much interested in the statement made by Mr. Curry, of the pioneer Knickerbocker Club, and confirmed by Mr. Tassle, of the famous old Atlantic Club of Brooklyn, that a diagram, showing the ball field laid out substantially as it is today, was brought out to the field one afternoon by Mr. Wadsworth. … From that day to this, the scheme of the game described by Mr. Curry, has been continued with only slight variations in detail. It should be borne in mind that Mr. Curry was the first President of the old Knickerbocker Club, and participated in drafting the first published rules of the game.
It is possible that a connection more or less direct can be traced between the diagram drawn by Doubleday in 1839 and that presented to the Knickerbocker Club by Mr. Wadsworth in 1845, or thereabouts, and I wrote several days ago for certain data bearing on this point, but as it has not yet come to hand I have decided to delay no longer sending in the kind of paper your letter calls for, promising to furnish you the indicated data when I obtain it, whatever it may be.
My deductions from the testimony submitted are:
First. That Base Ball had its origin in the United States.
Second. That the first scheme for playing it, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1839.
The Mills Commission report was published in the spring of 1908. The commission, which in its report stated that it had relied on “a circumstantial statement by a reputable gentleman,” determined that baseball was American in origin and had been invented by Abner Doubleday, who had been a major general in the Civil War.
Henry Chadwick, whose article about the origin of baseball had sparked the Mills Commission investigation, was appalled by the commission’s findings and immediately fired off a note of protest to Spalding. But the opinion of Chadwick, who died five weeks later, or anybody else who concurred with him, wouldn’t matter. Baseball was now certifiably an American game, created by an American. The findings of the Mills Commission were dutifully reported in the press. The New York World filed this story:
The commission appointed to determine where base ball originated has reported, after a painstaking investigation covering three years, that the game was first played at Cooperstown, N.Y. under the direction of Abner Doubleday in 1839. … Their report settles an old controversy and is entitled to respect of all investigators of the origin of the horse or discoverers of “missing links.” Base ball is thus proved to be, like poker, a genuine American product. It did not come “out of the mysterious East,” like our religions and languages, like chess and cards, peaches and sherbert. It was not played in ancient Rome, like hop-scotch and jackstraws. It is native, indigenous, all our own, and the fact is a just subject for pride.
On March 26, 1908, the citizens of Cooperstown, New York, learned possibly for the first time that their village had been the birthplace of America’s national sport when the Freeman’s Journal ran a front-page article with these headlines: “Home of Baseball,” “Game Originated in Cooperstown,” and “Abner Doubleday, Afterward Major General, Its Originator—A Monument Suggested.”
The news no doubt surprised the residents, and they had to have been taken aback by the timing of the announcement. The previous year, 1907, had been the village’s hundredth anniversary. Townspeople had tried to draw tourists by touting the village’s literary heritage—it had been founded by William Cooper, the father of famed novelist James Fenimore Cooper— and held a summerlong celebration. If only they had known that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball on their fields sixty-eight years earlier, surely they could have attracted more visitors!
With baseball codified as the invention of an American, the timing was ripe for Albert G. Spalding’s book, America’s National Game: Historic Facts Concerning the Beginning, Evolution, Development and Popularity of Base Ball with personal reminiscences of its vicissitudes, its victories and its votaries. The book reflected Spalding’s overflowing pride in America’s national pastime being a homegrown sport, but it also provided much information about the early days of baseball that would probably have been lost to posterity had Spalding not taken the time to write his book.
How American is baseball? This is an issue Spalding addressed, and it would be hard to accuse him of being shy about expressing himself in this regard:
I claim that Base Ball owes its prestige as our National Game to the fact that as no other form of sport it 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.
Base Ball is the American Game par excellence, because its playing demands Brain and Brawn, and American manhood supplies these ingredients in quantity sufficient to spread over the entire continent.
Spalding didn’t miss an opportunity to mock British gentility. Noting that cricket matches can sometimes take two or three days to complete, Spalding wrote that “cricket would never do for Americans; it is too slow.” But the Englishman “is so constituted by nature” to play such a “genteel game” for such a long time. Spalding continued:
Our British Cricketer, having finished his day’s labor at noon, may don his negligee shirt, his white trousers, his gorgeous hosiery and his canvas shoes, and sally forth to the field of sport, with his sweetheart on one arm and his Cricket bat under the other, knowing that he may engage in his national pastime without soiling his linen or neglecting his lady. He may play Cricket, drink afternoon tea, flirt, gossip, smoke, take a whisky-and-soda at the customary hour, and have a jolly, conventional good time, don’t you know?
Baseball, of course, was not a “genteel” game. Winning is what mattered, and, unlike the British, Americans didn’t mind getting down and dirty. Here’s Spalding on the difference between baseball and cricket:
Cricket is a gentle pastime. Base Ball is War! Cricket is an Athletic Sociable, played and applauded in a conventional, decorous and English manner. Base Ball is an Athletic Turmoil, played and applauded in an unconventional, enthusiastic and American manner.
Baseball at the time was of unchallenged popularity as an American sport, lapped up by kids across the country, and this fact also did not escape Spalding. He wrote:
In every town, village and city is the local wag. He is a Base Ball fan from infancy. He knows every player in the League by sight and by name. He is a veritable encyclopaedia of information on the origin, evolution and history of the game. He can tell you when the Knickerbockers were organized, and knows who led the batting list in every team of the National and American Leagues last year. He never misses a game. His witticisms, ever seasoned with spice, hurled at the visitors and now and then at the Umpire, are as thoroughly enjoyed by all who hear them as is any other feature of the sport. His words of encouragement to the home team, his shouts of derision to the opposing players, find sympathetic responses in the hearts of all present.
The Doubleday invention story was widely accepted after the Mills Commission report and received validation in 1934 when an old baseball with its seams torn apart was said to have been found in a trunk in an attic of a farmhouse in Fly Creek, New York, a hamlet about five miles west of Cooperstown. According to the story, a farmer from Fly Creek came to Cooperstown one day with a ball he had found in his house—the same house in which Abner Graves had once lived. Stephen C. Clark, a scion of a very wealthy local family who had an ownership interest in a local newspaper, purchased the ball for the sum of five dollars.
Clark decided to display the ball—soon dubbed the “Doubleday Ball” by a newspaper editor—with other baseball memorabilia in a Cooperstown club room. Then a man named Alexander Cleland, a top administrator for Clark, conceived the idea for a full-fledged national baseball museum. Indeed, the time was ripe, if not overdue, for such a venture. By the mid-1930s, baseball was a classic sport that had grown in America from a national pastime to a national obsession, and as such it needed its own full-blown shrine. Current players such as Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean, Lefty Gomez, and Pie Traynor had captured the public’s imagination, while stars of past eras like Cap Anson, Kid Nichols, Nap Lajoie, and Ty Cobb were already part of the folklore of the sport. When plans were being made for a centennial celebration of baseball in Cooperstown, National League president Ford Frick suggested a hall of fame to fete the sport’s most illustrious participants. The two ideas became intertwined, and with Clark’s resources, the concept came to life. On June 12, 1939, one hundred years to the day after the alleged invention of the sport by Abner Doubleday, a ceremony was held for the dedication of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown.
The Doubleday Ball was the most important of the Hall of Fame’s artifacts, its Holy Grail, but some mystery attended its acquisition. The ball was presented almost from the start as an artifact that demonstrated the link between Doubleday and baseball by virtue of its discovery in the house of Abner Graves. But neither the name of the person who had found the ball nor the location of the farmhouse where it was discovered were ever publicized.
Still, the story of the discovery of the Doubleday Ball may be true, and the ball could have been found in a house in which Abner Graves once lived. The Graves family did live in the Fly Creek area for several generations. And the ball was old, obviously from the nineteenth century, and indeed offered exciting possibilities for speculation about who had played with it.
Who played with this nineteenth baseball? Its origins are uncertain but the so-called Doubleday Ball is symbolic of the beginning of the sport of baseball.
The Doubleday Ball is small and is stuffed with cloth or cotton. From what is known about early balls, it is consistent with an early townball or early baseball. But it could also have been a toy. Many of these early balls were homemade and not sold at local stores. Farm families of the time had to be self-sufficient in many ways, and making a child’s ball would not have been uncommon, nor would it have been difficult.
The Doubleday Ball has a sewn leather cover and has no component of rubber, which wasn’t readily commercially available until the 1840s. Based on its stuffing and other characteristics, the ball could have been made in the 1820s or 1830s. A child may have used the ball to play catch with. It is also possible that the Doubleday Ball is the oldest extant baseball in the United States, but such a claim cannot be made conclusively without knowing exactly when the ball was crafted.
In any case, all conjecture about the ball is just that. The ball’s history cannot be known for certain, but one thing can be deduced: there is no demonstrable connection between the ball and Major General Abner Doubleday. Even if Abner Graves did own or play with the ball, that fact does not prove that Abner Doubleday of Civil War fame played with the ball, much less that he invented modern baseball.
It had long been believed that Abner Doubleday never wrote about baseball or even mentioned it in any of his writings. For years researchers scoured Doubleday’s articles, correspondence, and other writings, but could not find any discussion of baseball to substantiate the claim that he had invented the sport. In 1989, however, a letter written by Doubleday in which the term baseball is used was brought to light by Mrs. William B. Thomas of Wayne, New Jersey, who was searching records of the National Archives for information on Moses Hunter, her husband’s great-great-grandfather, who had served in the I Company of the Twenty-fourth Colored Infantry under Colonel Doubleday.
Abner Doubleday served in the Union army at the battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which commenced on July 1, 1863, and ended two days later, with heavy casualties on both sides. On the third day Doubleday ordered an attack on Confederate lines at nightfall. But General George Meade countermanded Doubleday’s order, which might have resulted in the capture of the main enemy force, including General Robert E. Lee himself, and ended the Civil War. A cloud hung over Doubleday’s name for a time after the war as military analysts suggested that it was his indecision that cost the Union a total victory. Although years later it became known that Doubleday had wanted to pursue battle, after the war Doubleday was returned to the rank of colonel and sent to Texas to command an African-American unit of soldiers. At the time this was considered an undesirable assignment, but Doubleday nevertheless took the demotion in stride, a true and loyal soldier above all.
In a letter dated June 17, 1871, from regimental headquarters at Fort McKavett, Doubleday requested funds from the U.S. Army adjutant general in Washington, D.C., to purchase portraits and statues that could inspire his troops, as well as items of recreation. Doubleday wrote:
I have the honor to apply for permission to purchase for the Regimental Library a few portraits of distinguished generals, Battle pictures, and some of Rogers groups of Statuary particularly those relative to the actions of the Colored population of the south.
This being a colored regiment ornaments of this kind seem very appropriate. I would also like to purchase baseball implements for the amusement of the men and a Magic Lantern for the same purpose. The fund is ample and I think these expenditures would add to the happiness of the men.
That Doubleday ordered baseball equipment for his troops does nothing to bolster the claim that he is the sport’s inventor, but the letter is of significance in that it is the only piece of extant writing in which the supposed inventor mentions the name of the sport with which he is associated.
Since its beginnings, baseball, arguably the ultimate, best-loved stick-and-ball game of all time, has come to mean many things for both fans and players. Played as an organized sport before the Civil War, baseball was proudly construed by Americans to be wholly American, a recreation devised, altered, guided, evolved, sparked, promoted, played, and passionately enjoyed on the shores of the New World, a lively diversion with an American historical tradition like Old Glory or ragtime or log-splitting.
As the twentieth century commenced—with the phonograph, telephone, automobile, and moving pictures already wondrous realities of everyday life; and radio, airplane, and television soon to become permanent fixtures in the tapestry of society—America had a glorious national pastime: baseball, the game that evoked the carefree spirit of summer, unbridled merriment, a sense of timelessness, idyllic charm, and oh, yes, an ethos of friendly competition.
The spirit of American nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century as brought out by the Spanish-American War set the climate for acceptance of the claim that an American had invented baseball. It was Abner Graves, a mining engineer who later murdered his wife, who made this claim, confusing Abner Doubleday the soldier with Abner Doubleday, the six-year-old boy in Cooperstown in 1839, when Graves alleged Doubleday invented the rules of baseball. The Mills Commission accepted Graves’s testimony, and the finding of a ball in 1934 that Abner Doubleday had purportedly played with at Cooperstown when he “invented” baseball substantiated the myth. The Mills Commission worked in an era when “invention” was the buzzword of the day, and every good idea had to have a progenitor. The Doubleday creation myth of baseball is a splendid tale that fills this bill, but it is, unfortunately, untrue.
The Doubleday creation myth was a patriotic construction that was convenient for its time and serves several other purposes as well. With its pastoral setting in Cooperstown, New York, and its war hero, Abner Doubleday, the myth fills Americans’ need for the genesis of their national pastime to have a bit of romance to it. It might even be argued, on a more philosophical level, that despite baseball having evolved over a long period, people are more emotionally satisfied with the notion of a single creator, even if it is a legend. Furthermore, the Doubleday creation myth has been beneficial for baseball and Cooperstown. Unlike the case with basketball, whose inventor and time of invention are known—James Naismith in 1891—the controversy over baseball’s origins and attempts to debunk the Doubleday myth over the years have given baseball an element of mystery that heightens awareness of the sport. Why go to all the trouble of digging out the truth when the myth serves so well? Indeed, the perpetuation of the Doubleday creation myth is in many ways undoubtedly healthy for baseball.
Still, debunking a myth does not, and should not necessarily, expunge the importance of a spurious relic, as the relic’s symbolism and what it means to people may sometimes be more important than its authenticity. Indeed, the world is full of artifacts that are not what they purport to be.
Learning the facts behind the baseball creation myth does nothing to diminish the symbolism of the Doubleday Ball. Like the romantic images conjured up by the sport, the Doubleday Ball, a quasi-validation of the Mills Commission’s conclusion, has become a symbol of the myth that Abner Doubleday created the sport, which is part of the tradition of baseball.
The Doubleday Ball is by tradition a vestige of the early days of baseball, fittingly shredded from use. Limned with the fingerprints of people who lived during baseball’s first days, it could have been a child’s toy, but it also just possibly could have been a ball that was gripped, tossed, and smacked by mid-nineteenth-century players in the game’s infancy. The Doubleday Ball handily fills the need for a crown jewel of the sport.
LOCATION: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, New York.
*Abner Doubleday and Albert G. Spalding have also been referred to as “fathers” of modern baseball.
*Among the Maine’s casualties were members of its championship baseball team. Only one of the team’s members, an outfielder, was not killed in the blast.
*Researchers have never been able to review the correspondence received by the Mills Commission or other paperwork it had, as its records were destroyed in 1911 when the New York City building they were in caught on fire.