ShareThisWhen I was a kid, many Americans still thought Abner Doubleday had invented baseball on a meadow in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839. (That's why the Baseball Hall of Fame is located there, alongside "Doubleday Field.")
Doubleday was a Union general who fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter, which makes him something of an American hero. But the whole idea that he invented baseball is preposterous. His many letters make no reference to such a role. Nor does his obit in The New York Times. He was attending West Point at the time he was supposedly in Cooperstown, handing down the sacred rules.
So, how in the world did we end up with Doubleday?
It has to do with American culture and history. In the intensely jingoistic era of the early 20th Century, the men who ran baseball wanted to prove that their game was a red-blooded American creation, rather than something that evolved from a sickly foreign transplant, such as British children's games. A blue-ribbon commission formed to investigate baseball's origins seized on a fortuitous letter from a man named Abner Graves, who told the tale of Doubleday's revealing his game right in Cooperstown.
What could be better than a Union hero founding America's game in a bucolic village? Nobody seemed to question Graves's reliability, though he was later convicted of murdering his wife and was sent to an asylum for the criminally insane.
The Doubleday myth eventually collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, and Doubleday was replaced by another hero-founder, this time with an iron-clad link to early baseball: Alexander Joy Cartwright of the New York Knickerbockers.
In 1953, no less an authority than the U.S. Congress declared Cartwright the inventor of baseball, and the Hall of Fame immortalized him as a member. A New York bank clerk and volunteer firefighter, Cartwright was said to have figured out the marvelous, magical mathematics of baseball in the 1840s -- bases 90 feet apart, nine innings of play, three strikes, etc.
Then, we are told, he set off on a wagon-train trip to California during the Gold Rush, teaching the game along the way -- baseball's Johnny Appleseed, planting the sport across the continent. From San Francisco, he sailed to Hawaii, where he spent the rest of his life.
I have in my office bookcase a 1973 biography of Cartwright called "The Man Who Invented Baseball" by Harold Peterson, a late Sports Illustrated reporter.
Horror of horrors, it looks like it wasn't Cartwright, either.
In her meticulously researched and scrupulously argued new biography, "Alexander Cartwright: The Life Behind the Baseball Legend" (University of Nebraska Press, $27.95), Monica Nucciarone makes the case that there is a lot less to his invention of baseball than meets the eye.
He was, indeed, a member of the Knickerbockers. But there is no strong proof he made up or even codified the club's rules. Indeed, an interview with one William Wheaton, published in San Francisco's The Daily Examiner in 1887, "calls into question nearly every claim made for Cartwright," Nucciarone writes.
In 1836, right after he passed his bar examination, Wheaton joined with New York lawyers, merchants and doctors to make a new bat-and-ball game that would be more exciting than cricket. They founded the Gotham Baseball Club, reworked the rules of an existing children's game to get rid of "soaking" the runner -- i.e., putting him out by hitting him with a thrown ball -- and created a diamond-shaped arrangement of the bases.
Wheaton claimed he put the rules they devised into writing, "and the code that I then formulated is substantially that in use today." Later, he and some of his fellow Gotham club members broke off and established the Knickerbocker Club, which Cartwright joined. It and other New York clubs played a game whose rules, codified in 1857 by the National Association of Base Ball Players, became the basis of modern baseball.
"As someone who was present when the Knickerbockers formed, we could presume that he should know how it happened," Nucciarone writes.
There is no similar first-hand account from Cartwright about his role in founding baseball. Everything seems to have come down secondhand from descendants.
And the "Johnny Appleseed" theory? It was said to have been based on Cartwright's journals of the Gold Rush trip. Yet, curiously, none of his original journals survive -- just family typescripts. And the baseball material seems to have been added later by his grandson to spice things up. As for biographer Peterson, "he did not cite his sources" and some of the materials he claimed to have used have yet to turn up anywhere.
As Nucciarone writes: "What the current evidence (or lack thereof) proves about Cartwright's particular baseball accomplishments has been overshadowed by a desire to mythologize a more compelling tale."
In truth, it looks like nobody invented baseball. It just evolved over time, reaching its perfection by trial and error. As much as we enjoy our baseball myths, we're just going to have to live with it!
(Contact Edward Achorn at eachorn(at)projo.com).
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
ColumnMust credit The Providence Journal
The "inventor" of baseball
Although I've not written a book, I've done a lot of research into the subject of who "invented" baseball. First, it is a silly question. Baseball, as we know it today was played in innumerable forms, (rounders, townball, one o'cat, etc, etc.) and then eventually crystalized into "modern" baseball.
However, what IS clear is the the NY Knickerbockers wrote specific rules that changed the game that was being played into a game that "more closely resembled" modern baseball. It was not "modern" baseball. "Modern" baseball was not played untill, well, yesterday. Even a cursory glance at the game as it was played in the late 19th century would tell us that much change had yet to take place.
But Duncan Curry, a leading member of the NY Knickerbockers at the time of the institution of the the new rules did, unequivacably state that they were "Cartwright's" rules. Not Wheaton's.
How Ms. Nucciarone can so casually discount this account, which has been verified by numerous scholars, is mystifying. She'd rather give credit to someone who is shouting, "I invented it! Me! I'm the one!"
Ridiculous.
In response to Mr./Ms. "Anonymous"
In the first paragraph of Mr./Ms. Anonymous, I agree with the statements there to a point. Yes, a type of "base" ball has been played for a very long time, and in more than one country (as best explained in David Block's book, Baseball Before We Knew It). However, the "New York Game" of baseball made its debut in all likelihood during the early nineteenth century.
As to the next two paragraphs, it seems apparent to me that Mr./Ms. Anonymous has not actually read my book, but has proclaimed his/her knowledge about what my book declares based on this one online article. For instance, in another part of my book, I mention the conflicting evidence where Duncan Curry, the Knickerbocker's first president, was also quoted as saying that "William R. Wheaton and William H. Tucker drew up the first set of rules for base ball during the late summer of 1845." This quote by Duncan Curry came from an interview with newspaper reporter William Rankin in 1877.
Regarding the final paragraph of Mr./Ms. Anonymous, I beg to differ that I declare anything at all. Again, another indication that Mr./Ms. Anonymous based his/her opinion on this one online article. Yet, I would undoubtedly love to speak with or see the works of any of the unnamed "numerous scholars," though there is hardly a book that mentions even the name of Cartwright that I do not own or have not included in the research for my book.
By the way, William Wheaton did not invent baseball, and neither did anyone else. For a more detailed understanding of this statement, I suggest borrowing my book from a library and read it to draw your own conclusions.
Monica Nucciarone
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