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Mining engineer Abner Graves authored a letter claiming that Doubleday invented baseball. The letter was published in a newspaper and eventually used by the Mills Commission to support its finding that the game was of American origin. In 1908, it named Doubleday the creator of baseball.
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- Who Was Abner Doubleday?
- What Are Baseball's Real Origins?
- HISTORY Vault: America the Story of Us
A Civil War hero named Abner Doubleday is often credited with developing the game in 1839, but the real history is older—and more complicated.
You may have heard that a young man named Abner Doubleday invented the game known as baseball in Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 1839. Doubleday then went on to become a Civil War hero, while baseball became America’s beloved national pastime.
Not only is that story untrue, but it’s also not even in the ballpark. Baseball's real origins date back way further, to at least the 18th century.
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Doubleday, who was born to a prominent family in upstate New York in 1819, was still at West Point in 1839, and he never claimed to have anything to do with baseball. Instead, he served as a Union major general in the American Civil War and later became a lawyer and writer.
In 1907, 16 years after Doubleday's death, a special commission created by the sporting goods magnate and former major league player A.J. Spalding was set up to determine baseball's origins—namely if it was invented in the United States or derived from games in the United Kingdom. The commission used flimsy evidence—the claims of one man, mining engineer Abner Graves, who said he went to school with Doubleday—to come up with the origin story, which managed to stick.
As it turns out, the real history of baseball is a little more complicated than the Doubleday legend. References to games resembling baseball in the United States date back to the 18th century. Its most direct ancestors appear to be two English games: rounders (a children’s game brought to New England by the earliest colonists) and cricket.
By the time of the American Revolution, variations of such games were being played on schoolyards and college campuses across the country. They became even more popular in newly industrialized cities where men sought work in the mid-19th century.
In September 1845, a group of New York City men founded the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club. One of them—volunteer firefighter and bank clerk Alexander Joy Cartwright—would codify a new set of rules that would form the basis for modern baseball, calling for a diamond-shaped infield, foul lines and the three-strike rule. He also abolished the dangerous practice of tagging runners by throwing balls at them.
Cartwright’s changes made the burgeoning pastime faster-paced and more challenging while clearly differentiating it from older games like cricket. In 1846, the Knickerbockers played the first official game of baseball against a team of cricket players, beginning a new, uniquely American tradition.
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You may have heard the charming tale of how war hero Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York. Unfortunately, that’s a bit of a myth. The true story of who invented baseball is a little more convoluted and a tad less romantic.
The Mills Commission concluded that Doubleday had invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York in 1839; that Doubleday had invented the word "baseball", designed the diamond, indicated fielders' positions, and written the rules. No written records in the decade between 1839 and 1849 have ever been found to corroborate these claims, nor could ...
At the time, Doubleday was a first-year, full-time cadet stationed at West Point, 155.7 miles away. The real story here is who invented the Abner Doubleday charade and how that scam was perpetuated for over a century. It starts with Albert Graves, a Cooperstown resident.
Abner Doubleday never claimed to have “invented” the game and he never mentioned Baseball in any of his extensive diaries. Although a statue of him stands on the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, he is not enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
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Oct 21, 2021 · “The ‘American game of Base Ball’ was invented by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York, either the spring prior, or following the ‘Log Cabin & Hard Cider’ campaign of General Harrison for President [approx. 1839], said Abner Doubleday being then a boy pupil of ‘Green’s Select School’ in Cooperstown, and the same, who as ...
