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.

Early Baseball History(to 1845)

Despite the myth that baseball sprang full-blown from the mind of Abner Doubleday in 1839, a game called baseball was around more than a hundred years earlier. It was probably just another name for rounders at first. But A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, printed in England in 1744, mentioned both baseball and rounders, suggesting that there was some distinction between the two by then.

Although primarily a boys' game, it was also played by girls. In Northanger Abbey, begun in 1796, Jane Austen said of her heroine, ". . . it was not very wonderful that Catherine should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the age of fourteen, to books."

The game of "bat and ball" was common in America before the Revolution, according to William Winterbotham's An Historical View of the United States (1796). By the time of the Revolution, it was commonly called "base" or "baste." And it wasn't necessarily a game for boys any more: American soldiers played it at Valley Forge in 1776 and the Princeton faculty banned it from the campus in 1787.

Early in the nineteenth century, two forms of baseball became very popular in the East. They were the Massachusetts game, also known as "town ball," and the New York game. The Massachusetts game used a smaller, harder ball and, in one important variation, allowed the pitcher to throw overhand. In the New York game, as in crickets and rounders, an underhand delivery was required.

Both games were similar to rounders in several ways. The batter (who was called the "striker") stood at a spot roughly halfway between fourth base and first base. When he circled the bases, he didn't actually make a full circuit, since he ended up about thirty feet from where he had begun. There was no foul territory; even if the ball glanced off the bat behind the striker, he had to try running to first. And, in most variations of either game, a runner was out when hit by the thrown ball while between bases (a practice called "soaking").

Baseball's "Invention" and Growth(1845-1869)

In 1842, a group of young professionals began meeting regularly to play baseball on a field at 47th Avenue and 27th Street in Manhattan. Three years later, they formed the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, evidently at the suggestion of Alexander Cartwright, the owner of a book and stationery store who had once been a volunteer fireman with the Knickerbocker Engine Company. A four-man committee was appointed to draft a constitution and by-laws. Cartwright and the committee's president, Daniel L. "Doc" Adams, did most of the work on the by-laws, which became baseball's first formal rules.

The rules called for four bases in a square, 42 paces (about 126 feet) on each diagonal. The batter was placed at the fourth base, which was renamed "home." "Soaking" was eliminated; a runner had to be tagged or forced out. The batter was out if his batted ball was caught on the fly or on first bounce.

The new rules also established three strikes for an out and three outs in a half-inning. A game lasted until one team scored twenty-one runs, or "aces" as they were then called.

In most histories, Cartwright has replaced Doubleday as the inventor of baseball, but it's impossible to know how much he actually contributed to the rules. However, he did draw the diagram of the new diamond.

The first recorded game under these rules, between teams made up of Knickerbocker members, was played on October 7 at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, NJ, a short ferry ride from Manhattan. On June 19, 1846, the Knickerbockers lost 23-1 to a team known as the New York Club in what is considered the first real baseball game. (Not as bad as it sounds; most of the players on the New York Club were actually members of the Knickerbocker Club.)

Inspired by the Knickerbockers, other baseball clubs were formed in and around New York City. More than a dozen of them sent delegates to an 1857 convention, presided over by Doc Adams of the Knickerbockers. Adams was chiefly responsible for three important rules changes: The length of the game was set at nine innings, the baselines were set at 90 feet, and the distance from home plate to the pitcher's base, which hadn't been specified in the Knickerbocker rules, was set at 45 feet.

On March 10, 1858, twenty-two clubs from the New York area formed the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP). Within two years, more than sixty teams belonged to the NABBP.

Although the Massachusetts game hung on for years in many parts of New England, the New York version spread rapidly across the country. The Civil War helped speed the growth. Thousands of young men from the Midwest learned the sport while training with Easterners. Union soldiers even played baseball in prison camps while their Confederate captors watched and learned.

The NABBP grew to more than 300 clubs from all over the country by 1867, when membership was limited to state associations except in those states that had fewer than ten clubs.

The rapid growth was a sign that the nature of baseball was changing. It was no longer merely an amusement for exclusive, socially-oriented clubs of young professional men. Workingmen were discovering the sport, and they didn't necessarily subscribe to the "it's only a game" attitude that had been adopted from the British sporting class.

The first such team, the Brooklyn Eckford club, was organized as early as 1854. Others followed slowly until after the Civil War, when many veterans brought the sport back to their home towns in the Midwest, where class distinctions weren't so sharply drawn.

The fact that baseball became the first really popular spectator sport also created problems, at least from the strict amateur point of view. Not only did fans cheer for their teams, they often bet on them. And so did some of the players.

Even some of the social baseball clubs began charging admission by the late 1850s, if only to help pay for the after-game banquet. The first person to see the commercial possibilities of baseball was probably William H. Cammeyer, who built the first enclosed field in Brooklyn in 1862. Cammeyer let teams use the field, free of charge, but he collected a 10-cent admission fee from each spectator.

By 1864, though, Cammeyer had to share gate receipts with the better teams from New York and Brooklyn. With teams collecting money, many players began to feel that they should get a share, too. Professionalism was at hand, though it didn't come out into the open until 1869.

The Professionals Take Over(1869-1875)

The National Association of Base Ball Players had a strict rule against professionalism. This was, at least in part, an attempt to keep baseball a game for well-to-do, professional young men like the original Knickerbockers. But, paradoxically, the NABBP also allowed teams to charge for admission, which was an unintended invitation to professionalism. Although no one took advantage of it for a while, the potential of baseball as a commercial sport was demonstrated in 1858, when a New York all-star team and a Brooklyn all-star team played a three-game series at the Fashion Race Course. About 1,500 fans bought 50-cent tickets to each of the games. With teams bringing in money at the gate, sharing some of that money with players could be only a short step away.

The first professional baseball player was probably James Creighton, who was also the first real pitcher, in the modern sense of the word. Until 1884, the pitcher was required to toss the ball underhanded, with a stiff arm; no snapping of the wrist or elbow was allowed. In effect, he was supposed to let the batter hit the ball.

Creighton managed to get tremendous speed on his pitches. When he realized that hitters could learn to time the pitch if the speed didn't vary, he worked a change-of-pace into his repertoire.

After starring for the Brooklyn Niagaras in 1859, at the age of eighteen, Creighton was reportedly paid a lump sum by the Excelsiors, another Brooklyn team, to join them in 1860. He led them to victories in every game on tours through upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.

Many other players were undoubtedly paid in one way or another during the next several years. For example, players for the New York Mutuals, controlled by "Boss" Tweed of Tammany Hall, were put on the city's payroll, though it's doubtful any of them did anything but play baseball for their money.

Throughout the 1860s, "revolving" was a problem: Since lump-sum payments were the norm, a player could collect his money up front from one team and shortly afterward go on to another team for another payment. Because the NABBP had a rule against professionalism, it couldn't regulate the practice. Teams were reluctant to bring charges when someone reneged on his deal, since they didn't want to admit they were paying players.

Gambling was another major problem. The Troy, New York, Haymakers were infamous for fixing games. Controlled by John C. Morrissey, a former bare-knuckle champion who had established a major gambling house at Saratoga, the Haymakers won when Morrissey bet on them and lost when he bet against them.

Late in 1865, it was revealed that three members of the New York Mutuals had conspired to lose a game to the Brooklyn Eckfords. One of them, shortstop Thomas Devyr, continued to play because the Mutuals didn't want to lose him. The other two players were banned but they had both been reinstated by 1870.

Newspapers, of course, unanimously attacked the effects of gambling on baseball, but professionalism wasn't so widely opposed. In fact, some of those who assailed gambling felt that open professionalism would nullify its influence, since players wouldn't be tempted to accept bribes if they could make an honest living on the field. And the New York Clipper, which had pioneered baseball coverage, suggested that open professionalism would improve the game by allowing players to concentrate on their skills.

The NABBP in 1868 established two classes of membership, for amateurs and for professionals. The following year, the Cincinnati Red Stockings suddenly appeared as the first openly all-professional baseball team, under the leadership of Harry Wright. Only one starter was from Cincinnati; most of the others were imported from New York. Salaries ranged from $600 for each of the four substitutes to $1,400 for shortstop George Wright, Harry's younger brother.

The Red Stockings toured the East, then went to the West Coast for a few games. They didn't lose in 1869, winning 56 games with one tie. They won another 27 straight in 1870 before losing 8-7 to the Brooklyn Atlantics in eleven innings. That was the last season for the Red Stockings in Cincinnati, where backers wanted to cut salaries.

It was also the last year for the NABBP. With professional and amateur members arguing bitterly, the 1870 convention adjourned without setting a date for another meeting.

In March of 1871, ten clubs founded the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP). One of them was the Red Stockings, now representing Boston; Harry Wright was still the manager and many of the same players were on the squad.

The NAPBBP was loosely organized. Teams paid a $10 fee to enter the championship race, but there was no formal schedule. The by-laws required each team to play five games against each other team in the association, with the championship going to the club with the most victories.

The Red Stockings and the Philadelphia Athletics both won 22 games in the association's first season, but Philadelphia had a better winning percentage and was awarded the championship. However, Boston won the next four pennants with relative ease, culminating with a 71-8 record in 1875.

Boston's dominance was a problem for other teams. Gambling and "revolving" were also problems, as they had been for the amateur association.

During the NAPBBP's five years of operation, twenty-five different teams belonged to the association at one time or another. Only three of them competed each season. A team that was far out of the pennant race often avoided having to pay travel expenses by simply not playing out its schedule. In 1874, only the Red Stockings played a full schedule; the following season, there were thirteen teams in the association at the beginning of the season, but only seven remained when it was over.

William A. Hulbert, the president of the Chicago White Stockings, felt that baseball had to be run more like a business. He also wanted to make his team the best in the business. Those two goals led to the end of the NAPBBP and the birth of the National League.

First Major League(1875-1889)

As president of the Chicago White Stockings, William A. Hulbert wanted to put together the best baseball team in the world. As a businessman, he wanted the team to make money, and he didn't see how teams could make money within the structure of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players.

Hulbert felt there wasn't enough structure. Teams that were out of the pennant race often decided to stay home and play exhibition games against non-association teams rather than spend money on meaningless road trips. Since the association membership was concentrated in the east, this was a major problem for western teams, like Hulbert's, since they had to make lengthy trips to fulfill their schedules and then, all too often, most of the eastern teams didn't reciprocate.

Hulbert envisioned a compact, permanent, well-balanced organization of eight teams, four in the east and four in the west, committed to a full championship schedule while avoiding games with outside teams, insofar as possible.

His first move, though, was to strengthen his own team. While the 1875 season was still underway, he persuaded four Boston stars, Ross Barnes, Cal McVey, Albert G. Spalding, and James "Deacon" White, to join the White Stockings in 1876, and he also signed Adrian C. "Cap" Anson of the Philadelphia Athletics.

The moves violated an NAPBBP rule that a player couldn't sign with another team until the season was over. Anticipating trouble from the Eastern clubs that controlled the association, Hulbert worked with representatives of the St. Louis team to draw up a constitution for a new league and lined up support from good independent teams in Cincinnati and Louisville.

Four of the association's Eastern teams, Boston, Hartford, New York, and Philadelphia, were then invited to a meeting in New York City on February 2, 1876. The eight teams agreed to form a new organization, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, which was to become the first true major league.

The name of the organization indicates a major change in structure: This was a league of clubs, not of players. The promoters and owners of the teams were to be in charge.

The fact that the National League still exists is a tribute to Hulbert's vision. The first several years were difficult but, as president of the league, Hulbert refused to back down from his original idea, even when disaster threatened.

He achieved his first goal, of building the strongest team in the world, immediately. His White Stockings won the league's first pennant with a 52-14 record in 1876. Ironically, that precipitated the league's first crisis: The New York Mutuals and Philadelphia Athletics, well out of the pennant race, didn't make their Western road trips.

Scandal Struck in 1877

Even though they represented the two biggest cities in the league, the clubs were expelled. Struggling through the 1877 season with only six teams, the NL had to confront a major scandal when four Louisville players were suspended for throwing games. Hulbert immediately banned them for life, and Louisville dropped out of the league, along with St. Louis and Hartford. They were replaced by Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Providence. Most teams lost money during those early years and the turnover in franchises continued, yet Hulbert held his course, returning to an eight-team format in 1879, although the cities represented were much smaller than they had been in 1876.

Owners fastened on player salaries as the chief cause of their losses. After the 1879 season, they secretly agreed to allow each team to reserve five players. Other league teams couldn't negotiate with any reserved players. That was the beginning of the reserve clause, which was written into the standard player contract in 1887.

In the interests of profitability and respectability, Hulbert persuaded most of the NL owners in 1880 to adopt rules requiring a 50-cent admission charge and banning both Sunday games and the sale of liquor on club grounds.

A couple of teams objected to the high ticket price, but went along with it. The Cincinnati club, though, refused to agree to the other new rules. Many of the Cincinnati fans were of German descent. Unhindered by English Puritanism, they believed in enjoying themselves on the Sabbath and they also enjoyed drinking beer while they watched baseball.

On October 4, 1880, Cincinnati was expelled from the National League. But baseball remained popular in the city. It was also popular in some other good-sized cities that had been excluded from the National League.

Cincinnati led a move to form a new major league. At a meeting in the city on November 2, 1881, the American Association of Base Ball Clubs was organized with five charter members: Cincinnati, St. Louis, Louisville, the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, and the Brooklyn Atlantics. The Philadelphia Athletics joined a little later. Shortly before the 1882 season opened, the Pittsburgh club dropped out and was replaced by Baltimore.

The Association featured a 25-cent admission charge, Sunday baseball, and the sale of liquor at games. At first, there was no overt attempt to sign players away from National League teams, but after two Association players jumped to the NL just before the season, Association teams struck back by signing some NL players to "optional" contracts for 1883.

Despite having only six teams to the National League's eight, the Association probably drew more fans in 1882. According to one report, five of its teams outdrew Chicago, which was by far the NL's biggest gate attraction.

Over the winter, the Association added teams in New York and Columbus. In response, the NL quickly dropped its weakest franchises, Troy and Worcester, and moved into New York and Philadelphia.

A Sudden Peace

It appeared that a major battle was going to take place, with both leagues spending heavily for players. But peace came suddenly and unexpectedly because the minor Midwestern League was being revived and its backers wanted the NL to respect its player contracts. The National League invited the American Association to join the talks and the three leagues worked out an agreement called the Tripartite Pact. It was later renamed the National Agreement to allow other minor leagues to become part of what became known as Organized Baseball.

The leagues agreed to honor one another's contracts and allowed each team to reserve eleven players, who could not be signed by any other club.

After a prosperous 1883 season, another challenge arose. Led by Henry V. Lucas of St. Louis, the Union Association placed teams in six major-league cities, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, as well as in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC.

The Unions said they would respect existing contracts but attacked the reserve clause. However, the new league managed to sign only a few established players and Lucas's St. Louis team won its first twenty-one games, virtually destroying fan interest.

Only five of the original Union Association teams made it through the season and the league officially went out of business in January of 1885. Meanwhile, Lucas was awarded a National League franchise in St. Louis.

Even after its demise, the Union Association haunted the two major leagues. The American Association, at the urging of National League owners, had expanded to twelve teams in 1884 to help fight off the Union threat, resulting in heavy losses. Lucas's team in St. Louis was another bone of contention, since the Association already had a team there.

In the spring of 1885, Association owners decided they would no longer honor the reserve clause, theoretically allowing them to sign players from National League teams. However, they also agreed to a conference committee to iron out differences between the two leagues.

New National Agreement Signed

The conference committee met in August and worked out a new National Agreement, under which the Association once again accepted the reserve clause, beginning another uneasy truce. Meanwhile, the players were getting restless, mainly because of the reserve clause. Nine members of the New York Giants formed the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players after the 1885 season, with shortstop John Montgomery Ward as president.

By 1887, the Brotherhood had members on every team in the major leagues. Ward tried to get the owners to recognize the Brotherhood as a union, but was turned down. The players did win one small victory: The reserve clause was formally written into the standard contract, rather than existing only as a semi-secret agreement among the owners themselves.

When the owners adopted the Classification Plan, setting a limit of $2,500 on salaries for the 1889 season, the players talked about striking on July 4. At Ward's behest, they voted against the strike, though. Ward had another idea: A new league, to be operated as a cooperative of players and team backers.

Dead Ball ERA(1901 - 1919)

It was called the "dead ball era", a period in baseball when pitching dominated the game. Rather than going for the long ball, batters of the day would try to squeeze out runs by bunting, stealing and punching out base hits. On the mound, the spitball and other trick pitches were often employed and ERA's of 3.00 or less were quite normal.

Large concrete and steel ballparks, which often held crowds of 30,000 or more, were built to replace the old wooden structures, as the game got more and more popular (and profitable), annual attendance rose from 4.7 million in 1903 to over 10 million in 1911. Players salaries also got fatter, but not as fat as the owner's bank accounts. In 1910 the average big league baseball player made $2,500 per year, with a few stars getting as much as $12,000.

In the A.L. the leading offensive star of the dead ball era was Ty Cobb, who stole 765 bases from 1905 to 1919 while capturing 10 batting titles, and hitting .364. His counterpart in the N.L. was Honus Wagner who won eight batting titles and stole 639 bases from 1900 to 1917. Other great offensive stars of the day were, Tris Speaker, Nap Lajole, Eddie Collins, Sam Crawford and Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Among the great pitchers of this era were such immortals as Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Eddie Plank and spitball artist Ed Walsh.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century the top National League clubs were John McGraw's New York Giants, who bagged six pennants and the Chicago Cubs, who won seven. In the American League, Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics walked off with seven pennants, the Boston Red Sox won five, and Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers took home three.

Baseball attendance in the A.L. and N.L. dropped to around 5 million per year in 1914 and 1915 when the well financed Federal League burst onto the scene. After the demise of the F.L., the two leagues had almost gotten back on their feet when World War One came along. Many players went into the service resulting in depleted rosters and a shortened playing schedule in 1918 and 1919. Attendance hit a low of 3 million in 1918, but rebounded to 6.5 million in 1919.

In 1918 the Boston Red Sox unwittingly helped to create a baseball legend. In order to help fill the holes in their lineup which had been caused by the war, Boston manager Ed Barrow was forced to put pitching ace Babe Ruth in the outfield between starts... and it changed baseball forever. That year he hit .300 and had 66 RBI (third best in the A.L.), the following year he belted a record 29 homers and his career as a pitcher was over.

Baseball Between the Wars (1920-1941)

Aided by the introduction of the lively ball and the unprecedented power surge of Babe Ruth, offense exploded during the 20's and 30's as the home run became baseball's defining act. With sluggers like Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio leading the way, the New York Yankees began a five-decade run as the sports' dominant franchise. In addition, baseball between the wars witnessed the advent of several trends that have stayed with us to the current day, including specialized relief pitching, minor-league farm systems, night games and radio broadcasts

The War Years (1942-1945)

World War II interrupted the careers of many of baseball's brightest stars. Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams and Bob Feller, among others, sacrificed significant chunks of their prime years in service of their country.

Baseball in Transition (1946-1960)

Two events would change baseball irrevocably in the years following World War II. At the center of both were the Brooklyn Dodgers, who in 1947 made Jackie Robinson the first African-American to play in a major-league game this century. Many others, as well as Latin and Asian players, soon followed Robinson's path as the national pastime began to more closely resemble the populace. Equally important in the game's chronology was the Dodgers' and rival New York Giants' move to the West Coast in 1958 as baseball grew beyond its eastern and midwestern roots. Soon, jets replaced trains as the prime method of player travel, and national television broadcasts helped the game reach a wider audience.

Owner-Managed Growth (1961-1975)

In 1961 and 1962 the major leagues added eight games onto their traditional 154-game season to accommodate the admission of four new franchises. This first round of expansion was repeated in 1969 as the major leagues moved from its early 20th-century origins of two eight-team leagues to four divisions of six teams each. The new configuration also generated a new round of post-season play as teams no longer qualified for the World Series merely by owning their league's best record. Pitching would reassert its primacy in these years as star hurlers like Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson terrorized opposing lineups. After the 1968 season, when Carl Yastrzemski won the AL batting crown with a record-low .301 clip, owners undertook a series of initiatives to reinvigorate offense, culminating with the introduction of the designated hitter to the American League in 1973.

The Free-Agent Era (1976-present)

Salaries skyrocketed as players took full advantage of their newly won right to shop themselves to the highest bidder. Labor conflicts became more prominent than ever before as lengthy strikes in 1981 and 1994 strained fan loyalty almost to the breaking point. In recent years, however, the new economics of the game have been driven by the construction of numerous "retro" stadiums designed to evoke nostalgia for baseball's past and provide cash cows for owners. On the field, hitting dominated to an extent that dwarfed even the fireworks of the 30's. Exceptions like Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux notwithstanding, pitching has never been in shorter supply. Led by sluggers like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Ken Griffey Jr., batting records have fallen at dizzying paces as outfield fences moved in and hitters bulked up.