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NEW Y ORK Volume 2 • Number 4 • Spring 2003 8 Americans revere Cooperstown and Abner Doubleday as icons of baseball, although historical evidence leaves both birthplace and inventor in doubt The Ongoing Fable of Baseball BY MARK McGUIRE he National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York contains: •2.6 million library documents • 30,000 “three-dimensional” artifacts, Tincluding 6,251 balls, 447 gloves, Babe Ruth’s bowling ball, and Christy Mathewson’s piano •half a million photographs •more than 15,000 files on every Major Leaguer who ever played • 12,000 hours of recordings • 135,000 baseball cards • one pervasive, massive, enduring myth Hall of Famer Hughie Jennings For in this mecca of the sport, history and historical fancy co-exist. Undoubtedly, the village that’s synonymous with baseball’s glory is the home of baseball. It’s just not baseball’s hometown. NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY LIBRARY BASEBALL HALL OF FAME NATIONAL NEW YORK archives • SPRING 2003 9 Many kids first learning about the game’s lore hear that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown. But most histori- ans––and even the Hall––acknowledge that the Doubleday tale is a myth concocted with the thinnest of evidence early in the twentieth century, a yarn promoted by a sporting goods Abner Doubleday fired the first magnate determined to prove that the game Union shot of the Civil War at was a uniquely American invention. Fort Sumter. And Doubleday was truly a unique American. NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY A West Point graduate, he fought in the Mexican War in 1846–48. He is credited with firing the first Union shot of the Civil War, at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. He was a brigadier general commanding volunteers in charge of defending But make no mistake: for all the romance Washington, D.C. In 1862, he was promoted to surrounding the Cooperstown fable, the Hall is a major general, later fought at Gettysburg, and repository of research. If you doubt it, consider this: served until his retirement in 1873. Thousands Cartwright is enshrined in the Baseball Hall saw him lie in state after his death in 1893. of Fame. In short, this pious Ballston Spa, New York Doubleday isn’t. native deserves to be exalted and remembered, since he did it all. Origins of the Game Except invent baseball. People have probably been hitting round items Maybe if history had gotten it right the first with sticks since the Stone Age. The British time, Hoboken, New Jersey would now be widely played two well-known games based on the hailed as the birthplace of baseball. And if anyone concept: cricket, the sport of men, and rounders, deserves to be called the Father of Baseball, it’s a children’s game. In America, various derivations Alexander Cartwright, not Abner Doubleday. of these games arose, including town ball, trap But in all likelihood, no one person can take ball, and barn ball, to name just a few. complete credit for evolving the sport from the A critical rung in the game’s evolutionary primordial ooze of a dozen bat-and-ball games ladder can be traced to New York City, where that were played at the time. The Hall’s library director, Jim Gates, calls any endeavor to identify a single birthplace “quixotic.” Maybe if history had gotten it right the first So the Baseball Hall of Fame, which embraces both scholarship and legend, deftly balances time, Hoboken, New Jersey would now be competing interests. As the Hall’s own 2001 yearbook states: widely hailed as the birthplace of baseball. Whatever may or may not be proved in the future concerning Baseball’s true origin is in many respects irrelevant at this time. If in the first half of 1842 men gathered to play baseball was not actually first played here a bat-and-ball game. They first played at in Cooperstown by Doubleday in 1839, it Madison Avenue and 27th Street, and later at undoubtedly originated about that time in a the foot of Murray Hill. similar rural atmosphere. The Hall of Fame On September 23, 1845, Alexander is in Cooperstown to stay; and at the very Cartwright, a tall, twenty-five-year-old shipping least, the village is certainly an acceptable clerk, corralled twenty-eight men to establish symbolic site for the game’s origin. the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York City, baseball’s first organized club. The name >> www.nysarchives.org 10 NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY LIBRARY BASEBALL HALL OF FAME NATIONAL picnic area with a view of downtown. “People began to take an interest in the game, and sometimes we had as many as a hundred spectators watching,” wrote Doc Adams, president of the Knickerbockers and a New Hampshire physician. On June 19, 1846, Elysian Fields was the site of the first pre-arranged game, pitting the Knickerbockers against the New York Club (formerly identified by historians as the New York Nine). The latter team won, 23–1. Historians, using the scorebook as a guide, believe the Knickerbockers did not play their first string: Cartwright umpired and, in fact, levied a six-cent fine against a player for profanity. But even these historically documented events leave doubt as to whether that Alexander Cartwright Knickerbocker–New York game was really the first. As noted by novelist and baseball historian came from a volunteer fire company to which David Nemec in his book Great Baseball Feats, Cartwright and several other players belonged. Facts & Firsts: Again from the Hall of Fame’s own yearbook: (H)ow did the Knickerbockers, purportedly ALEXANDER CARTWRIGHT Born April 17, the first club ever to organize mainly for 1820 at New York, N.Y. Died July 12, 1892 NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY BASEBALL HALL OF FAME NATIONAL the purpose of playing baseball, manage at Honolulu, HI. Elected to the Hall of Fame to lose so egregiously? Who were the New in 1938…often referred to as “The Father of York Nine? When and where did they Modern Baseball.” Though the appellation assemble and start mastering the intricacies may be an overstatement…Cartwright likely Henry Chadwick of the new sport? How sure are we that played a key role in formalizing the first they didn’t secretly play a slew of games to published rules of the game, including the prepare for Cartwright’s bunch and that concept of foul territory, the distance those games were the first ones? Well, the between bases, the three-out innings, and unhappy truth is that we’re not at all sure; the elimination of retiring base runners by nor, probably, will we ever be. throwing batted baseballs at them. In 1849, Cartwright left for California in a Cartwright and the Knickerbockers’ rules quest for gold and riches, taking with him a bat, and concepts posited that the infield was a ball, and the Knickerbocker rule book. He was diamond instead of a square. First and third NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY LIBRARY BASEBALL HALL OF FAME NATIONAL the Johnny Appleseed of the sport, playing it bases were forty-two paces apart. Foul lines all along his transcontinental trek. “It’s comical were implemented. Pitchers threw underhand to see mountain men and Indians playing from forty-five feet, elbow and wrist straight. the new game,” he wrote in his diary in Batters got three missed swings. The balk was Albert Spalding Independence, Missouri. defined and outlawed. Runners could either Cartwright would not find his riches in be tagged or thrown out. Soaking (hitting a California; instead he became a wealthy mer- runner with a throw to retire him) was banned. chant in Hawaii. He lived long enough to see A schedule of fines for ungentlemanly conduct his game become a national craze before the was imposed. Civil War, then grow into the National Pastime. Open space was hard to find in a city All of which begs the question: absorbing a flotilla of immigrants, so the Where did Abner Doubleday come in? Knickerbockers found a new home a ferry ride away at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields, a grassy NEW YORK archives • SPRING 2003 11 In this 1905 letter, Abner Graves claimed that Abner Doubleday invented baseball. Jim Gates was beginning to think it was a waste of time. In 1999, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s library director was going through boxes that had arrived via a Kentucky bank and that had been bequeathed to the Hall by the estate of one Jack M. Doyle. Mostly it was relative junk, a bunch of old Spalding Guide publications that the Hall NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY LIBRARY BASEBALL HALL OF FAME NATIONAL already had. They had belonged to Who Really Invented Baseball? Doyle’s father, John T. Doyle, Henry Chadwick, an English-born newspaper- once the president of American man, was a convert from cricket to baseball. Sports Publishing Company, Possibly even more than Cartwright, he nurtured which in turn had been owned the game from the cradle, convincing The by Albert G. Spalding, the man who, nearly a century ago, had New York Times and other dailies to run game orchestrated the drive that scores. He later became the first newspaper would end up designating baseball editor (for the New York Clipper) and Cooperstown as the birthplace worked for more than forty years at the of baseball. Brooklyn Eagle. In addition to writing baseball Then came the last two guides and yearbooks, Chadwick perfected boxes. In them were documents baseball’s shorthand, the box score.

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