Will we ever know who really invented baseball?
WHEN 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.
