The Patently False Baseball Myth That Refuses to Die

On Memorial Day weekend in 1983 I attended a sports history conference at the Mt. Alto campus of Pennsylvania State University.  On Sunday afternoon I joined a bus load of sport historians on a field trip to the sacred soil of the Gettysburg battlefield.  When we arrived at the monument that honors Abner Doubleday, our guide described his heroic contribution to the Union victory.  He also mentioned in passing that he was better known as the person who devised the rules of modern baseball on a ball field in Cooperstown, New York in 1839.  A chorus of boos rang out from our ranks.  Stunned, he listened to our objections, but I wonder whether he revised his talk for the next group of tourists.  I doubt it.

But that was twenty-seven years ago.  Since then Melvin Adelman, Warren Goldstein, myself, David Block, and others have published articles and books that expanded upon earlier critiques of the Doubleday tale by Robert Henderson and Harold Seymour.  Over the past few decades I have been encouraged by signs that our writings have had some impact on the general public, and especially the baseball community.  Many newspapers ran stories based on our findings, and radio and television sportscasters became less and less likely to credit Doubleday with the creation of the sport.  Even the management of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York modified its exhibits and this year published a book that contained an article entitled “The Doubleday Myth is Cooperstown’s gain.”

This fall I experienced even more proof of the waning of the legend.  For the past twenty years, whenever I began my discussion of the origins of modern baseball in my sports history class at Manhattan College, I always started with the simple question:  “who invented baseball?”  Invariably in the past an eager student answered:  “Abner Doubleday.”  I then told the clueless undergraduate that anyone who wrote that on an exam would not only fail my course, but would also be expelled from Manhattan College. But this fall, for the first time, no one gave that response.  I took that to mean that the myth was finally moribund.  (Or it could mean that students today do not share a basic knowledge of American popular culture—but that is a subject for a different column.)

Now, all of the good work we’ve done over the past quarter century or so has been ruined by the Commissioner of Baseball, Bud Selig, who recently stated that “From all of the historians which I have spoken with, I really believe that Abner Doubleday is the `Father of Baseball.’  I know there are some historians who would dispute this, though.”  So now we are back to square one.  We face a task more difficult than telling the truth about the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.

In a recent piece published on November 13 in the New York Times, John Thorn interpreted Selig’s comment on Doubleday as testimony to “the power of myths in American culture and the connection between baseball and youthful innocence.”  I agree, but would add two more reasons that explain why the Doubleday story has survived for so long, and why Selig and many others still find it so appealing.  The first is baseball’s continuing association with American nationalism.  Doubleday’s fame as a hero of the Battle of Gettysburg and the enormous power of the Civil War in American memory explain why Albert G. Spalding and Major League Baseball endorsed him as the inventor of the sport over a century ago.  Selig’s comment continues this tradition of connecting American patriotism with our national pastime.  The Doubleday myth perfectly suits that purpose, despite all the critical attacks by both academic and popular historians.

The second reason for the enduring power of the Doubleday tale is that it is simply a very appealing story. Most Americans (wrongly) think of baseball as a pastoral game that originated in rural America.  (Actually in its modern form it is an urban export of antebellum and Civil War-era New York City).  The founders of the Hall of Fame and Museum recognized the power of the story when they selected its first class of inductees in 1936 and opened its building in 1939.  Over the past seventy years the institution has used the Doubleday tale to market itself to millions of baseball fans, with stunningly successful results.  As Craig Muder, an official of the Hall of Fame, explained: “`The Myth’ has grown so strong that the facts will never deter the spirit of Cooperstown.”

So this is not a lament about the failure of academic historians to reach out to the general public, for both scholars and popular writers have written detailed works proving  a)  that Abner Doubleday was at West Point and not in Cooperstown in 1839; b)  that Doubleday never wrote a word in his published memoirs about any contribution whatsoever to the creation of our national pastime; c)  that the sole evidence for the Doubleday myth is a letter written by an old man to Spalding in which he recalled a ball game played sixty-five years earlier (and who shortly after writing the letter was declared certifiably insane); d)  that there is lots of evidence that Alexander Cartwright, Daniel Adams, Louis Wadsworth, and other members of the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York City devised the modern rules of baseball during the early to mid-1840s; e)  that the Knickerbockers played early intrasquad games in the Murray Hill section of the east side of Manhattan before moving their practice grounds to the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, New Jersey in 1845.

Historians are not to blame because these facts are irrelevant to the Doubleday myth.  There is something about it that is very compelling and that resonates with the souls of true baseball fans.  And who is more of a diehard fan than Bud Selig?  Besides—and no offense to the good people of Hoboken, New Jersey, which is now a very popular, gentrified town across the Hudson River from Manhattan—who wants to go to Hoboken for a visit to the “birthplace of baseball?” As a proud graduate of an upstate New York institution, I can attest that a trip to Cooperstown is a lot more appealing.  And besides, it turns out that there may have been another guy named Abner Doubleday at that magical ball game in Cooperstown in 1839…. You never know.