Abner Doubleday and the "Invention" of Baseball

THOMAS L. ALTHERR

Ten or fifteen years ago, most serious baseball historians subscribed to the line that Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball in Cooperstown in 1839, that such a claim was the product of spurious evidence from a quasi-demented mining engineer named Abner Graves and the jingoistic crusade of Albert Spalding to revel in baseball's "American" origins. Indeed, around that time, I composed a short encyclopedia entry, the gist of which went, in paraphrase:

One of the most bedrock and celebrated myths in sports is that Abner Doubleday invented baseball. In 1889, allegedly following a friendly dispute with New York City sportswriter Henry Chadwick over a claim that baseball has its roots in the British game of rounders, baseball player-manager and sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding set up a commission that launched a nearly twenty-year campaign to establish indisputably that baseball was an American invention. After years of collecting evidence that proved no such American origin, Spalding and Abraham Mills, the rather reluctant commission chair, seized on testimony in 1905 from one Abner Graves that Graves himself had witnessed the Cooperstown creation and Doubleday's display of genius as a boy from the nearby hamlet of Fly Creek. Emboldened by Graves's assertions, the Mills Commission anointed Abner Doubleday as the creator of the National Pastime.

According to this long-cherished version, Doubleday, a West Point cadet, home for the summer in Cooperstown in June 1839, gathered a group of boys from local academies in Elihu Phinney's pasture, drew up the rules, and laid out the ball field for the first baseball game. For Spalding and many other American patriots and Anglophobes, this "Immaculate Conception" myth tidied up the nagging suggestions that baseball had derived from European games along a circuitous path. Toss in the fact that Doubleday became a bona fide Union Army Civil War hero, at Fort Sumter as well as at Gettysburg, and the ingredients calcified into an unshakable mix of myth.

Baseball historians and other scholars began discrediting this story as early as 1938, the year before the Baseball Hall of Fame opened its doors in Cooperstown. Robert Henderson, a librarian at the New York Public Library, launched the first salvo with some "Notes on Rounders," descriptions of all sorts of European ball games (and a few American ones) preceding baseball, and compiled this evidence into a 1947 book, Ball, Bat, and Bishop.

Other historians centered their critique on Doubleday's surmised role as inventor. The major arguments against it focused on Doubleday's absence from Cooperstown in 1839, his exemplary attendance at West Point that year, the fact that until his death in 1893 he himself never claimed to have invented the game, even in his autobiography, and the increasing number of discoveries by Henderson and others that bat-and-ball games had long antedated the hallowed date. Indeed, in 1816, Cooperstown itself had enacted an ordinance against ball play in the streets. How remarkably prescient of the village fathers to prohibit a game that would not be invented until twenty-three years later!

Then there was the matter of Abner Graves, a quirky character to say the least, whose checkered past and inconsistencies hardly inspired credibility. How convenient that he held on to not only his memory but the very ball from that first game! As cynical Catholics and non-Catholics alike are wont to point out, there are enough pieces of the "true" cross on altars across the world to construct another Notre Dame cathedral. Hardly a choirboy, Graves had left a long trail of shady investments and failed mining ventures. Later, in the 1920s, he married a woman quite his junior and then killed her during a marital dispute. Saved from execution by an insanity defense, Graves spent his waning years in a mental institution.

Yet a few supporters of the Doubleday creation story persist, even today. They maintain that Graves remembered the year wrong, that Abner, the young cadet, was in and out of town in years before and after 1839. Some argue that there was another Abner Doubleday who Graves mixed up with the future famous military leader. Yet others hold out hope that more evidence will surface to lock in the nationalist pedigree. Several members of the extensive Doubleday clan cling loyally to the legend, even to the point of occasionally sending a hate letter to anyone who may dare impugn their beliefs. For its part, the Hall of Fame acknowledges the substantial skepticism about Graves's evidence but still exhibits the ball Graves alleged he kept from that supposedly historic 1839 event. And as one waggish Hall of Fame official declared, "Well, maybe baseball wasn't invented in Cooperstown, but it should have been!"

As I now revisit the same topic after years of study, I find myself retreating from categorical statements. So much new research about the early phases of baseball and ball play history has appeared in the past ten or fifteen years that I hesitate to close the case on the whole Doubleday episode. One of the first things my dissertation advisor at Ohio State said in our first historiography seminar many years ago still rings in my ears: "Historians should never say 'never.'" Although I retired from teaching a couple of years ago, I spent the better part of my career...