First Documented Game
According to the legend, Doubleday devised the game of “baseball” while a student at Green's Select School in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. He laid out the diamond shape of the field and gave position names to the nine players on it. When baseball chose the site for its Hall of Fame, it paid homage to the man who had invented the game and the town in which he did it.
But if baseball had wanted to be historically accurate, millions of fans would today be making their pilgrimage to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Hoboken, New Jersey. For it was there, on June 19, 1846, that the first documented game of baseball, between the New York Team and the Knickerbocker Baseball Club, was played utilizing a nine-player team and four-base diamond.
And what about Doubleday? The story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball originated in 1907. A commission headed by A.G. Spalding had convened to determine the game's origins. An elderly man named Abner Graves testified that he had been present at the first game Doubleday organized in Cooperstown.
Over the years, researchers have concluded that the Doubleday-Cooperstown story is completely false. There is no evidence that Doubleday ever visited Cooperstown, let alone that he attended Green's Select School. Doubleday kept 67 diaries in his lifetime, none of which even mentions baseball.
Mantle Worn by a Myth
The truth is that the game had developed slowly over the course of the 1800s, evolving from the English games of rounders and town ball. The nine-inning game was only established in 1857. Before that time the first team to score 21 runs won.
A bizarre footnote occurred in 1924 when 90-year-old Abner Graves, the man who had concocted the Doubleday myth, murdered his wife and was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.
It would seem that no one person lays claim to the title of “Inventor of Baseball.” But perhaps it is only fitting, for our most mythic of games, that the mantle is most firmly worn by a myth. It is only appropriate that at Arlington National Cemetery, resting along side the nation's greatest heroes, is the man who, if not in truth then in legend, invented America's National Pastime.
(This article can also be found on National Review Online.)
Military Heroics
Born in Ballston Spa, New York, in 1819, Doubleday attended the West Point and served in the army until his retirement in 1873. A veteran of the Mexican War, it was Doubleday who fired the first Union shot from Fort Sumter.
In 1862 he was placed in command of the defenses of Washington D.C. His division fought at 2nd Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. As a newly minted Corp commander, his staunch defense of Cemetery Hill helped assure a Union victory at the battle of Gettysburg.
However, it is not for his military heroics that General Doubleday is known. As any schoolboy, and most adults, will tell you, Abner Doubleday invented baseball.
