Forgotten Treasures: Booze and Baseball Myths

We’ve all heard about the myth of baseball’s creation by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, way back in 1839. We know it’s a myth because:

• Abner Doubleday didn’t live in Cooperstown in 1839. He was already a West Point cadet by then.

• Doubleday never once claimed to have invented baseball, or to have played it, or to even have any particular interest in it.

• The person who first spun this yarn, Abner Graves, would have been about five years old when he was supposedly present at the creation, while Doubleday would have been twenty.

• Graves was a particularly awful source, having previously told a few other proven lies about riding for the Pony Express and sailing around Cape Horn. He later murdered his wife and died in an asylum for the criminally insane.

The truth is that baseball wasn’t invented by a single person. It evolved over time as an offshoot of games like rounders and townball. Unfortunately, some folks (cough) Albert Spalding (cough) had business interests involved in making baseball out to be a unique American game with a single inventor, so Graves’ odd tale was seized upon and spun as fact when it wasn’t. As the old movie line goes, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That’s what happened with this story. It was repeated so often, long after it was debunked, that is simply became accepted despite being utterly untrue.