It was the fall of 1908 and Abner Doubleday had a problem. If a pumpkin were set on a low fence and he stooped, just a bit, and swung a tree branch through smoothly, he could knock the pumpkin into next year. But how could that be a game?
A few days later, while out walking with his favorite mastiff, King, and carrying a walking stick, he picked up a walnut and tossed it into the air; striking it with the stick, the “ball” flew well out into the field they were walking through. Again, that didn’t seem like much of a game.
The seasons rolled around. It was a few years later. This time his grandson was out tossing walnuts around and catching them—sometimes—in a kitchen mitt. Doubleday’s wife, not liking how the walnuts stained the kitchen mitt, put batting around the walnut and then sewed a leather cover around the whole “ball.” Now husband and grandson could toss and throw the ball without staining their clothes—or grandma’s kitchen mitts.
Yet, ultimately, it was a teacher at their grandson’s school who organized the first actual game of baseball. The teacher’s name, also Abner (oddly enough), created rules and brought decorum to an unruly recess activity in which some students threw walnuts at other students who often wildly swung tree branches, trying to hit any walnuts thrown in their direction.
In more recent years the chaos of those early recess games is reenacted annually in the post season wild card games of major league baseball.
Of course, none of this is true. The game was invented in 1839 in part based on the British game of cricket. Abner Doubleday, a mere lad of 20 in 1839, was a part of the long grey line that is the West Point tradition. He was not simultaneously inventing baseball in a field in Cooperstown, New York, 152 miles away. Indeed, the first baseball league was created in 1845 when he was on active duty in the US Army.
Further, by 1908 retired modern Major General Abner Doubleday was not alive; he had died fifteen years earlier after having served in the Union Army during that America’s most uncivil of civil wars. Later, he did receive a patent—but not for the invention of baseball. Instead, it seems likely that though he did have grandsons, neither they nor he created anything other than a cable car company in San Francisco, California.
Perhaps that invention should suffice as Doubleday’s contribution to baseball as one can take the cable car to watch the San Francisco Giants, “Play ball!”
