You may have heard the charming story of how war hero Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York. Unfortunately, that's a bit of a myth. The true story of who invented baseball is a little more complicated and a little less romantic. The myth of the only person who invented baseball mentioned above is that of Abner Doubleday.
It has been said that Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in the summer of 1839, and then went on to become a hero of the civil war, while the game he invented became America's hobby. Who invented baseball? This question has occupied a place in American consciousness since the 1880s. The best known answer is that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. The casual observer who knows something about the origin of baseball knows the story of Doubleday.
The next answer is that Alexander Cartwright invented baseball in 1845 in New York City. The casual observer who knows two things about the origins of baseball knows that the story of Doubleday is naive, and that the story of Cartwright is the sophisticated version. The story of Doubleday is really naive, but the story of Cartwright is no less so. An unsentimental search for evidence of Cartwright as the inventor of baseball yields weak results.
The trap ball may be the origin of the concept of foul lines; in most variants, the ball had to be hit between two posts to count. Similar versions of baseball rules and game descriptions have been found in publications that significantly predate their alleged invention in 1839. That's why he specified that “I wasn't the one who played ball, which is strange to say about the supposed inventor of baseball. The earliest origins of modern baseball can be traced back to the 18th century in England and the games brought to New England by some of the first settlers of the New World. Spalding was created to determine the origins of baseball, that is, if it was invented in the United States or if it was derived from games in the United Kingdom.
The solution to this awkward situation was to vote for Cartwright in the Hall of Fame and name him the “Father of Modern Baseball,” implicitly adopting the combined version of Doubleday inventing and Cartwright perfecting baseball. Additional evidence of a more collective model of the development of New York baseball, and doubts about Cartwright's role as inventor, came with the discovery in 2004 of a newspaper interview with William R. The story of Doubleday's origins unfolded in 1907 when a special commission, the Mills Commission, created by A. Graves told how Abner Doubleday, who became a general in the Civil War, invented baseball and taught the children of the town.
The origin story of baseball can be quite confusing; no one knows exactly where it comes from. Many people attribute the invention of baseball to a man named Abner Doubleday, a general in the United States Army in the Civil War and later a writer and lawyer. It is clear that in 1907 he interpreted this as Cartwright being the inventor of baseball, with more elaborations derived from this. In that letter, Ford refers to the “gray-haired old men” of the time, who had played this game as children, suggesting that baseball's origins in Canada date back to the 18th century.
The Mills Commission accepted Graves's story and published The Mills Commission Report on April 2, 1908, proclaiming Doubleday the inventor of baseball.
