The summer boys are at it again. Who can we bless for the Great American Pastime?
One thing is for sure. It was not Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839, as a self-proclaimed commission of patriotic Americans would have us believe. Let’s debunk the Doubleday myth before we move on.
Doubleday was born in 1819 in Ballston Spa, NY, to a family prominent in military and civilian life. He attended school in 1835 at Cooperstown, where he enrolled in engineering courses. He was appointed to West Point in 1838 and graduated in 1842 with a commission in the artillery.
He served with distinction in the Florida Seminole and Mexican Wars. He fired the first Union shot at Fort Sumter after the Confederate bombardment that opened the War Between the States. He became a major general and died in 1893.
It is noteworthy that in the 60 journals that Doubleday kept throughout his life, he does not mention baseball. In a letter to headquarters during the Civil War, Doubleday requested “recreational supplies for colored troops” including a “magic lantern and baseball equipment.”
Doubleday would have become a Civil War footnote had it not been for another Abner with the last name Graves.
In 1905, a famous sportswriter named Henry Chadwick wrote an article stating that baseball evolved from the old English game Rounders.
This upset Albert Spalding, one of the game’s pioneer players and manufacturer of sports equipment. He could not accept the premise that the great American game did not originate in the United States.
Spalding organized a commission of seven prominent men, all patriots, to determine the “true origin” of baseball. The project was widely publicized.
At the head of the commission was Col. AG Mills of New York. He had played baseball before and during the Civil War and was the fourth president of the National League in 1884.
The commission was virtually at a dead end until Abner Graves, a mining engineer from Denver traveling to Akron, Ohio, saw a newspaper article about the commission. He sat in his hotel room and wrote to the Mills Commission on stationery.
In the letter, Graves stated that he had observed Doubleday in Cooperstown in 1839 scratching a baseball diamond in the ground and instructing other young men on how to play baseball with teams of 11 players and four bases.
Graves described how the ball used was homemade from horsehide sewn together and stuffed with rags.
Commissioners for Mills and Spalding were elated. They quickly proclaimed that baseball was invented by a US Army officer from the Civil War. As American as possible.
The lack of corroborating evidence was of no consequence. Graves shortly thereafter murdered his wife and was committed to an insane asylum.
Graves’s story was patently false. He would have been only five years old in 1839 and therefore not a reliable observer. Doubleday had entered West Point in 1838 and was therefore not present at Cooperstown that year.
Doubleday may have been remembered at the Cooperstown school, which Graves later attended, for having organized a baseball game among his fellow students. However, the rudiments of the game, as we recognize it today, were already well known throughout the country.
Twenty-seven years after the triumphant Mills Commission report, a relative of Graves, rummaging through his old trunk, found an old baseball with its skin torn on top of a pile of rags. Graves’ letter and torn baseball are on display today as proof positive in the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame.
how baseball started
The stick and ball games were recorded in pyramid times.
The “stool ball” was described in the 1085 Doomsday Book census of England. The variations were rounders, town ball, and one-o-cat.
On Christmas Day, 1621, Governor Bradford at Plymouth Plantation noted that the men of the colony “frolicked in the street, played open games; some threw the ball, others played stool and similar sports.”
In 1744 John Newbery of London, England published A Pretty Little Pocket Book “intended for the amusement of little master Tommy and fair Miss Polly.” A woodcut illustration showed children playing “Base-Ball” in which they moved around the posts.
George Ewing, a Revolutionary War medic at Valley Forge in 1778, wrote: “I exercised in the afternoon intervals, played on the base.”
A New York University librarian, George A. Thompson, Jr., recently found two articles in a New York newspaper from April 12, 1823, clearly related to modern baseball.
The longest story, in the National Advocate, consisted of just four sentences:
“Last Saturday I was very pleased to witness a company of active young men playing the masculine and athletic game of ‘base ball’ at the Broadway Retreat.
“I am informed that they are an organized association, and that a very interesting game will be played next Saturday in the aforementioned place, to begin at 3:30 in the afternoon. Any person who is fond of watching this game can take the opportunity to see how it was played. with consummate skill and marvelous dexterity. It is astonishing and unfortunate that the youth of our city do not indulge more in this manual sport. It is innocent amusement and wholesome exercise, accompanied at little expense, and has no demoralizing tendency.”
Organized Teams
The first organized baseball team was formed in New York City in 1845 by two young friends. They were Dr. Daniel L. Adams and Alexander Joy Cartwright, an accounting clerk. They and other young professionals met after work in Madison Square.
Adams and Cartwright agreed to a set of rules in 1845 so there would be no endless bickering. Cartwright wrote them down.
At that time, the playing field used to be square with five bases. Due to the confined area, the diamond and four bases were adopted. The distance between bases was fixed at “42 paces” (about 75 feet) and the concept of dirty territory was introduced. The practice of “hitting” a runner, hitting him with a pitched ball to “take him out”, was abolished as ungentlemanly.
The Madison Square players formed the Knickerbockers Base Ball Club in September 1845. With rules in hand, the Knickerbockers announced the opponents.
They met the New York Nine at neutral Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 19, 1846.
The Nines won 23-l. The score indicated that the game followed rounder rules, ending after 21 runs had been scored instead of a specified number of innings.
According to contemporary reports, Cartwright refereed the game and imposed a six-cent fine, payable on the spot, for swearing.
Cartwright joined the California Gold Rush in 1849, but was too late. On the way home by boat, he fell ill and was landed in Hawaii. He liked the tropical climate so much that he feels sorry for his family. He founded baseball clubs on all the islands and became a prosperous businessman. He died there in 1892.
The Knickerbockers Club continued to be active under the leadership of Dr. Adams. He introduced the roving shortstop position, for himself, to relieve field goals. He designed the tapered bat and invented the hard baseball of “rubber clippings and string” to facilitate pitched balls and make the curveball possible. He set the distances between bases at 90 feet in 1857.
Also that year, he chaired a convention of players who decided the winner of a game was the team ahead after nine innings. The following year, the group adopted the name of the National Association of Ball Players.
He lobbied for a rule requiring a batter to be called if the ball was caught on the fly instead of on the first bounce. This was hotly debated, but in 1860 it was decided fly balls were necessary if both teams agreed beforehand.
Dr. Adams left his New York practice in 1865 and moved his family to Connecticut. He played his last formal game of baseball in 1875 in a veterans contest. He died in 1899 at age 85 in New Haven, still playing backyard baseball with his children.
It’s ironic that Cartwright, Spalding and Doubleday are memorialized in Cooperstown while Adams is not, despite the fact that he devised all of baseball’s modern rules.
It’s not to argue. The story is mostly legend, and baseball is as much an icon as a sport.
April 6, 2003
