Known as America's pastime, baseball has been a beloved sport since its creation in 1839. That's the year a young Abner Doubleday, an eventual Civil War hero, invented the game in a cow pasture in the quaint town of Cooperstown, New York. It's an amazing story. Unfortunately, it isn't true. Baseball's legitimate history has been obscured in favor of the popular Doubleday myth, leaving the truth to only serious scholars and baseball trivia experts.
Baseball's Origins
No one person invented the game of baseball. It actually evolved over the course of many years from the British game of rounders, which features two teams competing to strike a hard leather ball with a stick and then rounding four bases to score. However, rounders employs a shorter bat that's swung one-handed and has different rules regarding pitching and base running, with batters running on every good pitch even if they don't hit it. If any man deserves credit for creating baseball, it's Alexander Cartwright, who produced baseball's first written rules in 1845.
Spalding Commission
In 1905, Al Spalding, a former professional baseball pitcher and wealthy manufacturer of sporting equipment, put together a special commission to investigate the origins of baseball. Spalding insisted baseball was an American game invented by an American and wanted to dismiss any connection to the English game of rounders. Two years later, Spalding and his commission did just that, announcing that deceased Civil War hero Abner Doubleday had created baseball.
Abner Graves
Spalding and his commission based their findings solely on the testimony of Abner Graves, a man in his 80s who claimed to be a childhood friend of Doubleday's. Graves wrote the commission a letter stating that he remembered Doubleday organizing other boys in a game of baseball in 1839. That was good enough for Spalding, who declared Doubleday baseball's inventor despite Graves having nothing to support his claim. Not long after, Graves murdered his wife and was committed to a mental asylum, throwing his credibility into further doubt.
Doubleday Myth
Abner Doubleday was born in 1819, some 15 years before Abner Graves, who would have been just 5 when he reportedly saw his 20-year-old "friend" Doubleday invent baseball. To make matters worse, Doubleday's family had left Cooperstown by 1837, and Doubleday was enrolled at West Point in 1839, when he was supposedly inventing baseball back in Cooperstown. Upon his death in 1893, Doubleday left behind 67 diaries without a single one containing any mention of baseball.
Stephen Clark
During the 1930s, prominent Cooperstown citizen Stephen Clark pounced on the Doubleday story and used it as a way to increase tourism to his hometown. Calling Cooperstown the birthplace of baseball, Clark convinced National League President Ford Frick and baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to create the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, forever changing the town's economy for the better.
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