Hoboken and the Beginnings of Baseball
By Nicholas Acocella

Part 5a - The Doubleday Myth (1)

The fantasy that Abner Doubleday was somehow the spontaneous progenitor of a brand new historical new game called Base Ball is less a myth than one of the great historical hoaxes of all time. It was conceived by Albert G. Spalding, a star pitcher in the 1870s, the manager of the first National League pennant wining club in 1876, the owner of the same Chicago White Stockings in the 1880s, and the founder of the sporting goods company that still bears his name. Distressed by the prevailing view that baseball had evolved from rounders -- a belief championed by British-born sportswriter and baseball chronicler Henry Chadwick in a 1903 article -- Spalding formed a commission two years later to study the origins of the game. A such things often go, he had predetermined that baseball was an exclusively American game. (He was given to pronouncements on the "manly virtues" of the game, virtues he associated with the United States and considered antithetical to anything associated with England.) For more than two years, the commission, headed by former National League president A.W. Mills, did little but collect old reminiscences and partisan diatribes on the rounders/no rounders debate. Then came the letter from Abner Graves.

Recounting events that had allegedly taken place 68 years earlier, Graves told how, in 1839, his boyhood chum Abner Doubleday had reconfigured town ball for a prep school contest in Cooperstown, NY, because, with 20 to 50 players on a side, the older game had resulted in too many injuries from collisions. In the process, Graves maintained, Doubleday not only invented a new game, but also christened it Base Ball. Ignoring the initial protests of commission member Chadwick (not to mention the available historical evidence), Spalding pounced on this "proof" that the game's beginnings were "free from the trammels of English tradition, customs, and conventionalities." On December 20, 1907, Mills issued his report, crediting Doubleday not only with spontaneous creation of baseball, but also with the abolition of soaking -- this last despite Graves's explicit recollection that the practice was integral to Doubleday's "new" game.