Forgotten Treasures: The Doubleday Baseball
As you all probably know if you’ve been reading here for a while, everything to do with the most commonly-told origin story of baseball is a flat-out lie.
We’ve all heard about the myth of baseball’s creation by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, way back in 1839, but we know that’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. Since then it was repeated so often, long after it was debunked, that it simply became accepted despite being utterly untrue.
An offshoot of this particular myth involved something known as The Doubleday Baseball. It’s a real ball, and still sits in the Hall of Fame to this day. Well, I assume it hasn’t been moved since I last visited in 2023 and took this photo:
