Introduction to Section One: Baseball,
The Musical
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Yes, in an awkward misstep, the “Father of Baseball” honor was bestowed upon both Alexander Joy Cartwright and Henry Chadwick. By most accounts, both men were deserving of the title, having handled their historical diaper duties suitably. Alex ran the show on the field. A fireman, bookseller, and bank teller at various times in his early life, he organized the Knickerbockers baseball club in 1845 and is often credited with helping standardize the rules by which today’s players abide. Henry, a journalist, was more cerebral. He devised the game’s early statistics and popularized baseball through his various rulebooks and guides, first appearing in 1856. It is unlikely that the two men ever met.
For decades, no one questioned the birth of baseball. In fact, few seemed to care about its origin. It wasn’t until the early 1900s when people started snooping around that a custody battle ensued.
That’s when the Mills Commission, a gaggle of jingoistic baseball gurus, convened to ensure baseball was truly an American invention. At the time, in 1905, nasty rumors swirled that baseball had been adapted from the games of cricket or rounders, both played with some zeal in England. As you might imagine, that would not suffice for America’s “national pastime.”
The commission found itself in a pickle when there was no credible evidence that baseball didn’t evolve from its British cousins. Not to be derailed, commission members freely accepted a quaint tale about how, in 1839, a twenty-year-old military cadet named Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, a rural hamlet in upstate New York. Better yet, Doubleday grew up to be a Civil War officer—a nice bonus for the commission’s marketing department. However, having died thirty-four years earlier, Abner was unavailable for comment at the time of his appointment to the position of “inventor of baseball.” Plans were soon drawn up to build a museum to honor baseball’s rich history. It was to be located in Cooperstown, New York, the, uh, Birthplace of Baseball . . . an inauspicious beginning for the national pastime, indeed.
Vindication came for Cartwright and Chadwick in 1938, when they were inducted as pioneers of the game into baseball’s Hall of Fame. These men also had been dead for decades. The following year, the baseball shrine opened to the public to commemorate baseball’s centennial, an event based on when Doubleday had supposedly “invented” the game. There is a nifty baseball field on the grounds of the Hall of Fame called Doubleday Field.
And, you now know that the Hall was built in Cooperstown because of the Doubleday legend. But Abner Doubleday, the unwitting interloper, was never enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
Other deserving names were tossed into the “inventor of baseball” ring, some that even cast doubt about the influence of Cartwright and Chadwick. In 1904, Chadwick dismissed the hunt to find the game’s true paternity. Taking liberty with a well-worn reference of the time from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he said: “Like Topsy, baseball never had no ‘fadder,’ it jest growed.”
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