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Old Wed Jun 04, 2003, 04:46pm
Dakota Dakota is offline
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Re: Re: R3, R2, & R1 works well

Quote:
Originally posted by IRISHMAFIA
Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with it. The game of Rounders was a game brought from England which resembles slow-pitch softball more than any incarnation of a game with bases.
The Doubleday Myth
Albert Goodwill Spalding, a former player turned sporting goods magnate, convinced himself that baseball must be a purely American invention and, like many true believers, he wanted to convince everyone else as well. When baseball writer and historian Henry Chadwick boldly stated, in Spalding's own Baseball Guide of 1903, that baseball had come from rounders, an English game, Spalding was upset.

He wrote a rebuttal in the 1905 Baseball Guide and proposed that a commission should be formed to investigate the origins of baseball. The members were hand-picked by Spalding himself. Although Abraham Mills was the chairman, most of the "research" was done by James Sullivan of the American Sports Publishing Company, which Spalding owned.

Actually, there wasn't much research involved. But the commission received a letter from Abner Graves, a retired Denver miner in his eighties, who had lived in Cooperstown, New York, as a youth. Graves said that Abner Doubleday had created baseball in 1839, when he was supposedly a student at Green's Select School in Cooperstown. Graves wrote in part:

[Doubleday] improved Town Ball, to limit the number of players, as many were hurt in collisions. . . . He also designed the game to be played by definite teams or sides. Doubleday called the game Base Ball, for there were four bases in it. Three were places where the runner could rest free from being put out, provided he kept his foot on the flat stone base. The pitcher stood in a six foot ring. Anyone getting the ball was entitled to throw it at a runner between bases, and put him out by hitting him with it.

Graves's statement was warmly embraced by the commission--or, at least, by Mills. When he finally published his report on December 30, 1907, he accepted most of the story. He did make one major change, unsubstantiated by any other evidence: He said that Doubleday had eliminated the practice of throwing the ball at the runner while between bases.

Spalding, of course, was delighted. Abner Doubleday, the major general who had fired the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, was an ideal candidate to be the inventor of baseball. But there were, and are, a lot of problems with the story.

First, there's no evidence that Doubleday ever even set foot in Cooperstown. A native of Ballston Spa, New York, he went to school in Auburn. Second, in 1839 he was a student at West Point, and the school had no summer vacation at that time.

Third, Doubleday left extensive writings and diaries, and never mentioned baseball. Recalling his youth, he wrote, "In my outdoor sports I was addicted to topographical work and even as a boy amused myself by making maps of the country around my father's residence which was in Auburn."

Still, the Mills report was accepted as gospel, although Henry Chadwick called it "a masterpiece of special pleading which lets my dear old friend Albert escape a bad defeat."

In 1937, the State of New York, Cooperstown, and Organized Baseball began making plans to celebrate the sport's supposed centennial by establishing the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. In the midst of the planning, Bruce Cartwright Jr. wrote a letter to baseball officials claiming that his grandfather, Alexander Cartwright of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club had invented baseball in 1845, and he offered his grandfather's diaries as proof. About the same time, researcher Robert Henderson of the New York Public Library submitted irrefutable proof that baseball had been derived from rounders.

The Hall of Fame was, of course, established at Cooperstown, anyway. But Abner Doubleday was not enshrined. Alexander Cartwright was.

source: http://www.hickoksports.com/history/doublday.shtml
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