Tracing The Abner Doubleday Myth
A look at an old legend
Tracing The Abner Doubleday Myth
While working on something completely different the other day, I decided to take a few minutes to rewatch my favorite old baseball history documentary:
There are actually a lot of historical gaffes in the script. However, near the beginning was a statement about Abner Doubleday not being the inventor of baseball — a statement that kind of stood out to me.
It’s not that the documentary is wrong, of course. It’s right. However, I started wondering if I could figure out where that legend originally came from.
I’m not sure that I’ve found the actual beginning of the legend. However, I think I know where it came from.
The first clue comes from this 1905 San Francisco Examiner article about an inquiry into where the sport came from:
That same article gives us an idea of where the folk story about Doubleday came from:
In contrast was the argument of Henry Chadwick, which is almost certainly the correct story:
Part of the confusion, of course, came from Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide 1905, which started off with this:
I won’t reprint the entire article here due to its length. You can find it for free on the Internet Archive.
The really interesting part, however, starts on page 9:
As you can see, the argument here was chiefly nationalistic in nature. In other words, Spalding wanted to prove that baseball was somehow a “uniquely American” sport, and that any ties to rounders or other English games must be discounted.
And Abner Doubleday became a pretty easy person to credit:
Of course, Spalding was telling the public what it wanted to hear. It wasn’t easy to research these things in those days, either. This New York Times article was printed almost 70 years after Doubleday allegedly invented the game, which meant that there weren’t a whole lot of people around who could remember what happened.
By April 1908, articles like this popped up in newspapers around the United States:
And the 1908 Spalding Guide had this special feature to boot:
Technically, both viewpoints were presented, though Spalding’s article was over 4 times longer than Chadwick’s:
I suppose the final conclusion was inevitable:
Of course, the fortunate thing is that history isn’t determined by a committee.
There is a great book called "Baseball Before We Knew It" that provides good evidence that baseball did not come from rounders but that both games were parallel developments of an earlier English game referred to as "Base Ball".
Amusingly, a memoir by an 18th Century royal governess mentions that one child who played the English "base ball" game was the future King George III -- the guy we revolted against.