If you believe Abner Doubleday invented the game of baseball, put down that Louisville Slugger – you just struck out.
Although baseball is believed by many to be a strictly American game, its beginnings originated in games played in other countries, and Doubleday was – in baseball terms – very much a minor leaguer when it came to the sport's roots, says a Texas A&M University researcher who is writing a book about baseball in rural America.
History professor and baseball fan David Vaught says that the often-held idea that baseball was a game played mostly in big cities and it was all crafted on a panoramic grand design by Doubleday are big-league errors.
In short, you can forget those "Field of Dreams" visions.
"The game was played in upstate New York long before Doubleday was supposed to have invented it in a cow pasture in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839," Vaught says.
"It was already rooted in the region's rural culture. No one individual came up with the game as it played today – it was a combination of several different games that evolved into baseball. It's a myth that has been perpetuated through the years that has become accepted, but it's just not true."
In 1905, baseball appointed Abraham Mills, the fourth president of the National League, to begin an official investigation into the origins of the game. The Mills Commission's report issued in 1907 concluded that Doubleday was "baseball's inventor" and that his idea "was as brilliant and distinguished as his career as an officer in the Federal Army.
"So just like that, baseball was born, and it had a romantic, pastoral appeal, or at least that's what so many people have come to believe over the years," Vaught says.
Doubleday was a Union general who likely fired the first cannon shot in defense of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the battle that started the Civil War. He later played a key role in the Battle of Gettysburg.
Following his death in 1893, Doubleday left numerous letters and papers, but none of them ever mentioned baseball in any way, let alone that he had invented the game. In addition, it was later learned that Mills, the commission chairman, had been a colleague of Doubleday during his Civil War days and had even served as an honor guard for his body as it lay in state in New York City, Vaught says.
"Every major scholar has pretty much debunked the tale that Doubleday invented baseball," he notes, adding that in 1839, when the commission claimed that Doubleday invented the game, he was still a cadet at West Point.
As for the game itself, a British version called "rounders" involved hitting a ball with a stick, and Vaught says there are drawings in Egyptian tombs that show men hitting a ball with long rods.
In an ironic twist, he says there are records of the game being played in upper New York as early as 1816, and the city of Cooperstown – where the Baseball Hall of Fame is located today – passed ordinances outlawing baseball there because the town leaders considered it "a decline of American youth."
Early versions of baseball had anywhere from eight to 50 players on a team, the ball could be hit in any direction, including behind the batter, the field was square-shaped and a fixed number of runs – often 100 – meant a game was over.
"The game as we know it didn't evolve fully until the 1880s, when the field took its diamond shape, overhand pitching was allowed, the distance between the pitching mound and home plate became standardized and the number of balls and strikes was fixed," he explains.
Another idea that's totally off-base: that baseball was a "big-city game played by big-city players." Baseball quickly spread across the country, from the East Coast to the remote California gold miners in 1849 and was often played during the Civil War both by Union and Confederate soldiers, who took the game back to their hometowns when the war ended.
Baseball was very popular in rural areas and it especially appealed to farmers, Vaught adds.
"When farmers played baseball or rooted for their favorite team, they displayed some of the central elements of rural culture – competitiveness, materialism, and individualism as well as hard work, cooperation and mutuality," Vaught adds. "Baseball offered not only an outlet for the tensions of rural life, but a means of translating a core set of values into action."
In addition, during baseball's early days, about 90 percent of American workers were involved in agriculture, compared to just 2 percent today.
Bottom line: the legend that Abner Doubleday created the game of baseball is not worth a tobacco chew.
"Trying to find the inventor of baseball is like trying to find the inventor of fire," Vaught says.
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