The most well-promoted story about the invention of baseball is that Abner Doubleday invented it in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. This story was given the official stamp of approval in 1907 by Albert Spalding, who was head of a Special Baseball Commission established by President McKinley, charged with determining the true origin of the game. This is the reason the
Baseball Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown.
In
Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please? (published in Great Britain this month) Julian Norridge argues for the British origin of baseball, pointing out that British references to baseball can be found as far back as 1755, and that
even Jane Austen mentioned the game 40 years before its "official" invention in America.
Actually the Doubleday story about the invention of baseball has long been considered incorrect by historians. Even the Baseball Hall of Fame admits that it's dubious. Spalding was desperate that baseball have an American origin and therefore gave credence to a statement submitted by an old man named Abner Graves, who remembered Doubleday inventing the game in Cooperstown in 1839 -- even though Doubleday was living in West Point in 1839, not Cooperstown.
Cooperstown might be a good location for a real Museum of Hoaxes. It's in a nice location. The town itself owes its fame to Spalding's hoax. Plus, the Cardiff Giant is housed there at the
Farmer's Museum. (Thanks, Joe!)
Comments
2. Spalding's stake in the issue was due to his role as an 1860s professional baseball pioneer, and his ownership of the nation's largest sporting goods business.
3. Nobody has believed the Graves story for a very long time, not even the Hall of Fame. The references to baseball in Jane Austen and in a late 18th-century children's sports book, as well as the 1792 Pittsfield, Mass. anti-baseball law, have been well known for decades.
4. It's generally acknowledged that cricket and baseball originated from the same primitive English bat and ball game, and the two developed independently on opposite sides of the ocean.
5. The real father of American baseball was Alexander Cartwright, who in 1845 codified the unofficial rules that had previously been used, and organized the first baseball club, the New York Knickerbockers.