[Sunday,
February 3rd is that national holiday known as Super Bowl Sunday.
For this year’s Super
Bowl series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of great sports debates—add your
opinion into the mix in comments, please!]
On what’s not
the case about the sport’s origins, and two interesting details of the
(uncertain) real story.
So apparently Abner Doubleday had
nothing whatsoever to do with the invention of baseball. I’m not gonna
pretend for a second that I knew that before researching this post—indeed, blog
completists might remember that I highlighted Doubleday as at least a strong
contender for the title in this
long-ago post on Thomas Dyja’s Play
for a Kingdom (if you are really that long-standing and attentive of a
reader, please please please leave a comment or email me and say hi!). But while
former baseball player, club executive, and sporting goods entrepreneur Albert
Spalding really pushed
the narrative of Doubleday as the sport’s inventor—going so far as to
commission his friend and former National League President Abraham Mills to “investigate”
the question, leading to the highly suspect Mills
Commission report of December 1907—the truth is that there is no specific
evidence in Doubleday’s life or writings, or any peripheral materials, to
support the myth. That’s particularly ironic because the Mills Commission
identified Cooperstown,
NY as the site of Doubleday’s invention (in the equally fabricated year of
1839), leading to the eventual location of the Baseball Hall of Fame in that
town.
Doubleday’s lack
of involvement with the sport’s invention is far more certain than the question
of when baseball was invented, and by whom. Indeed, what is far more definite
is the late 19th and early 20th century featuring warring
camps, and that those camps were often explicitly linked to the ongoing rivalry
between
England and America. The English historians traced the sport’s origins to
various traditional folk games, from archaic games like “stoolball” and “trap ball”
to the more familiar (and still played) parallel sports of cricket
and rounders.
Their American rivals acknowledge these antecedents and influences, but focus
instead on more direct references in early American texts and documents to
games like “baste
ball” (mentioned in the 1786 diary of Princeton
University student John Rhea Smith), or to “baseball” being included (alongside
“wicket, cricket, batball” and others) in a 1791 bylaw in Pittsfield,
MA. In truth, what these various historical examples and details indicate is
that the sport developed over centuries, through various iterations and stages,
and was played in both England and America for many years before being
standardized and professionalized (on which more in a moment). But that’s not
as sexy as a fight to the death between Revolutionary rivals, so I’ll let the transatlantic
diamond turf war proceed unchecked.
Apologies to my
EnglishStudying colleagues and friends, but it was more definitely in an
American setting that the sport’s rules were first laid down in a more standardized
way. That setting was New
York City in September 1845, where the Knickerbocker Club and its officers
Alexander Cartwright, William Wheaton, and William Tucker published a set
of rules that came to be known as (duh) the Knickerbocker
rules. These rules were close enough to the modern game that in 1953
Congress credited Cartwright as the sport’s inventor, which was a total
slap in the face to the Williams but that’s another story for another post. But
in any case I think we can all agree that the most compelling thing about the
Knickerbockers was their decision later in 1845 to move their home games to Hoboken,
NJ’s Elysian
Fields, which remains the most impressively named field or stadium I’ve
ever encountered. As I’ve highlighted in just about every post I’ve written about
baseball in this space, the sport captures certain fundamental, pastoral,
idyllic American images in a legendary, mythological way that defies precise
histories, which might just explain why the history of its own invention
remains and likely will always remain an open debate.
Next debate
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other great debates you’d highlight?
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