The boys of summer 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 he would have us believe a self-proclaimed commission of American patriots. Let’s dispel the Doubleday myth before we continue.
Doubleday was born in 1819 in Ballston Spa, NY, to a family prominent in military and civilian life. He attended school in 1835 in 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 Mexican and Seminole wars in Florida. 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 diaries that Doubleday kept throughout his life, he does not mention baseball. In a letter to headquarters during the Civil War, Doubleday requested “recreational items for colored troops” that included a “magic lantern and baseball equipment.”
Doubleday would have become a footnote to the Civil War had it not been for another Abner with the surname 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 pioneering 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 practically at a dead end until Abner Graves, a Denver mining engineer traveling to Akron, Ohio, saw a newspaper article about the commission. He sat in his hotel room and wrote to the Mills Commission on letter paper.
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 how to play baseball with teams of 11 players and four bases.
Graves described how the ball used was home-made from horse hide sewn together and stuffed with rags.
Mills and Spalding commissioners were elated. They quickly proclaimed that baseball was invented by a Civil War US Army officer. As American as possible.
The lack of corroborating evidence was of no consequence. Graves soon after murdered his wife and was committed to an insane asylum.
Graves’ 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 in Cooperstown that year.
Doubleday may have been remembered at the Cooperstown school, which Graves later attended, for organizing 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 Mills Commission’s triumphant report, a relative of Graves’s, rummaging through his old trunk, found an old baseball with torn skin lying on a pile of rags. Graves’ letter and torn baseball are on display today as positive evidence at the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame.
how baseball started
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 openly; some threw 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 went around the goalposts.
George Ewing, a Revolutionary War medic at Valley Forge in 1778, wrote, “He exercised in afternoon intervals, played 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, was made up of just four sentences:
“Last Saturday I was very pleased to witness a company of active young men playing the athletic, masculine game of ‘base ball’ at the Retreat on Broadway.
“I am informed that they are an organized association, and that next Saturday a very interesting game will be played in the aforementioned place, to start at 3:30 p.m. with consummate skill and marvelous dexterity. It is surprising and regrettable that the youth of our city do not take more of this manual sport. It is innocent amusement and wholesome exercise, accompanied with 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 would hang out after work in Madison Square.
Adams and Cartwright agreed on 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 set at “42 paces” (about 75 feet), and the concept of dirty territory was introduced. The practice of “hitting” a runner, hitting him with a thrown ball to “take him out”, was abolished as being ungentlemanly.
The players from Madison Square formed the Knickerbockers Base Ball Club in September 1845. With the rules in hand, the Knickerbockers announced the opponents.
They met the New York Nine at the neutral Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 19, 1846.
The Nines won 23-l. The score indicated that the game followed the rounders rules, ending after 21 runs were scored instead of a specific number of innings.
According to contemporary reports, Cartwright refereed the game and imposed a fine of six cents, payable on the spot, for swearing.
Cartwright joined the California Gold Rush in 1849, but he was too late. On the way home by boat, he got sick and was put ashore in Hawaii. He liked the tropical climate so much that he felt sorry for his family. He founded baseball clubs throughout 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 traveling shortstop position, for himself, to relieve shots from the field. He designed the tapered bat and invented the “rubber and string clippings” hard baseball to make pitching balls easier and make the curveball possible. He established the distances between bases at 90 feet in 1857.
Also that year, he presided over a convention of players who decided that the winner of a game was the team that was ahead after nine innings. The following year, the group adopted the name of the National Association of Ball Players.
He pushed for a rule requiring a batter to be called if the ball was caught on the fly rather than the first bounce. This was hotly debated, but in 1860 it was decided that fly balls were necessary if both teams agreed to it 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 sons.
It’s ironic that Cartwright, Spalding and Doubleday are commemorated in Cooperstown while Adams is not, even though he devised all of the modern rules of baseball.
It is not to argue. History is mostly legend, and baseball is as much an icon as it is a sport.
April 6, 2003