The Doubleday Myth

For nearly a century the official story of baseball began right here, and it was wonderfully simple. In nineteen oh five a special panel called the Mills Commission set out to prove that baseball was purely American, not descended from the English game of rounders. The sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding stacked the panel with allies.

Their star evidence was a letter from an elderly mining engineer named Abner Graves, who claimed that as a boy he had watched Abner Doubleday lay out the first baseball diamond in Cooperstown in eighteen thirty-nine. At the end of nineteen oh seven the commission declared Doubleday the inventor of the game. There was just one problem.

Almost none of it was true. Abner Doubleday, who later became a Union general and helped defend Fort Sumter, was actually a cadet at West Point in eighteen thirty-nine and left behind no writing about baseball at all. Modern historians agree the game evolved gradually from older bat-and-ball games brought from England.

Much of its modern shape came from Alexander Cartwright and his fellow New York Knickerbockers, who wrote down a code of rules in eighteen forty-five, establishing the diamond and the foul lines. Even that story gets exaggerated, because baseball had many parents, not one. Cooperstown honors a myth, but it tells the truth about it too.