Steve Harnedy Abner Doubleday nothing in writing but he also was to have invented baseball during or after the civil war. General Abner Doubleday and His Wife Baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday This myth has been widely spread since 1907 and even today is sometimes presented by such people as Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig. The fact of the matter is there is no record of Civil War General Abner Doubleday having anything to do with baseball. This includes Doubleday himself never mentioning it in the many letters and journals he wrote in his lifetime. Somewhat humorously, the only real reference to Doubleday concerning sports appeared in his obituary in 1893, which stated he was a man “who did not care for outdoor sports”. So what happened in 1907 to make people start thinking Abner Doubleday invented baseball? In 1905, Albert Spalding put together a panel called The Mills Commission to investigate the origin of baseball. This was in response to an ongoing argument he’d been having with Henry Chadwick about the origin of baseball. Chadwick claimed, correctly, that baseball evolved from a variety of stick ball games from Europe, primarily the game of “rounders” Chadwick had played as a boy in England. Spalding claimed baseball was invented free of such influences and was a wholly American-made sport. The panel Spalding put together did not include any historians, but rather was comprised of former National League presidents A. G. Mills, Nick Young, and Morgan Bulkeley; former Washington club president Arthur Gorman; two former players and now sporting goods businessman George Wright and Alfred Reach; and finally the Amateur Athletic Union president James E. Sullivan. Initially this group had very little luck in discovering a definitive origin of baseball, though by all accounts they didn’t try very hard to actually do any research. They seemed to simply rely on placing advertisements, requesting that if anyone knew anything about the origin of baseball, they should respond. Finally, in July of 1907, Spalding sent a letter to the Commission outlining an account of the origin of baseball he’d learned from 71 year old Abner Graves, a mining engineer, who incidentally shortly after giving this account wound up in an insane asylum, where he spent the rest of his life. According to Spalding, who embellished Graves’ statement, on a fateful day in 1839, the man who would later become a Civil War hero, supposedly interrupted a game of marbles and taught a group of boys to play a sport he’d just invented. Based solely on this story and without bothering to check into its accuracy, The Mills Commission decided that baseball had been invented by General Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. It should be noted, though, that Graves’ letter did not set a definitive date. He seemed to think this event happened sometime between 1839 to 1841; it was the Commission that settled on 1839, at which point Graves would have been five years old. Further, contrary to what you’ll often read, Graves initially didn’t claim to have been there when the game was invented (though he later changed his tune and said he played in that game). He initially just said “I do not know, nor is it possible to know, on what spot the first games was played according to Doubleday’s plan.” He then recounted the rules Doubleday supposedly laid down which were actually more or less just rules for a version of Town Ball. Town Ball was a game commonly played by school boys throughout the U.S. with the exact rules varying based on where you played it. It, in turn, evolved from the English game “rounders”. Spalding and the Commission embellished Graves’ story to make it sound more definitive. It is possible Abner Doubleday really did play a game of Town Ball in the late 1830s in Cooperstown, as this was a common game and there would have been nothing unique about a young man playing a version of it, but he certainly didn’t do it in 1839. Abner Doubleday wasn’t in Cooperstown in 1839, he was at West Point at the time, which is about 150 miles away and West Point has no records of him taking leave, including him remaining at the school throughout that summer. Given Abner Graves was four years old when Doubleday left Cooperstown for West Point, it’s not clear how he learned of the details of this supposed first game. Close friends of Doubleday, which included A.G. Mills who was on the Commission, claimed that not only could they not remember a single instance of Doubleday ever claiming to have had anything to do with baseball, none of them even remember him even mentioning the sport at all, despite its spreading popularity towards the end of Doubleday’s life. Doubleday died in 1893, so he couldn’t be asked directly. Given how well documented his life was, particularly through his journals and letters, it seems curious that he never mentioned it in word or in text, if we’re assuming he invented it. Despite not bothering to check up on this story at all, The Mills Commission decided it was true and the tale was widely published. They were motivated by the fact that Abner Doubleday was a Civil War hero who rose to the rank of Major General. Further, the idea that baseball sprang out of the farm fields in small town America was an appealing one to the Commission. One of the underlying goals of the Commission was to prove that baseball had been wholly invented in the United States and did not evolve from a variety of European stick-ball games. Graves’ story not only did this, but “proved” that an American war hero had invented it to boot. As A.G. Mills stated in 1926 when asked what conclusive proof the Commission had that Doubleday invented the sport, he replied: None at all, as far as the actual origin of baseball is concerned. The committee rep
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 16:08:48 +0000
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