Baseball DIY

No matter which third-grade classroom you walk into, there will be at least one kid who takes great joy in telling the others that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and George W. Bush's soul do not exist.

Let me play that role right now.

The Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown because that is where, allegedly, Major General Abner Doubleday (who was present at Fort Sumter) invented baseball in 1839. The Mills Commission report of 1907 is to blame for this lie.

In the first decade of the 20th century, baseball's origins were under dispute: a side headed by the admittedly British Henry Chadwick (editor of Spalding's Official Baseball Guide) held that baseball evolved from rounders; another side led by National League president Albert G. Spalding (the guy who proposed that each different position should wear a different uniform in order to bring his business more revenue) held that it was as American as exploiting cheap labor...these were not, I confess, his exact words.

Spalding put together the Mills Commission, which "found," not surprisingly, that baseball was indeed an American pastime. They pinned the invention of baseball on Doubleday, based almost entirely on the testimony of one man, Abner Graves, who said he saw Doubleday teaching the game to kids in Cooperstown in the 1830s. Spalding wrote, "It certainly appeals to an American's pride to have had the greatest national game of Base Ball created and named by a Major General in the United States Army."

Case closed!

Except that there has been no other evidence connecting Doubleday to baseball in any fashion. No diary entry saying, "Today, I made up a great game." No baseballs, bats, or pine tar in his house. He died in 1893 and so was unable to deny anything, and never made any claim of inventing the game in the 54 years between 1839 and 1893. It is more likely that baseball evolved from rounders, and that the true origin of what we now recognize as baseball is the set of rules devised by Alexander Cartwright and the New York Knickerbockers in 1845.

But baseball had its myth. Myths are usually more powerful than the truth. So when organized baseball got the idea for a Hall of Fame in the '30s, Cooperstown was the natural fit, and sleepy Cooperstown, New York, welcomed the idea of getting some money. The Hall of Fame opened as part of the "centennial" of baseball's creation. Don't you love it when a plan comes together?

For more on the Hall of Fame and the Doubleday myth, I recommend Bill James' Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?, Ken Burns' Baseball, and Talmage Boston's 1939: Baseball's Tipping Point.