The Origins of Baseball

Widely credited, undeniably; or at least he was for much of the 20th century. But the accreditation is false.

By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely believed (in America, at least) to have been wholly American in origin. In 1888, a group of star players embarked on a world tour to promote the game. The following year, a dinner was held in New York to honour the players and baseball's role as "America's ambassador to the world". The "prestigious crowd of 300 guests" included Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain. Even at this stage it was felt necessary to emphasise that "baseball had not, as many believed, evolved from the British game of rounders."

The debate rumbled on, and in 1903 the British–born American sportswriter Henry Chadwick wrote an article tracing baseball's origins in rounders. Albert Spalding, who had taken part as a pitcher on the 1888 tour, disagreed; he published an article disputing Chadwick's claim, and challenged him by suggesting that they appoint a commission to settle the matter. Chadwick agreed, and in 1905 a commission was formed, to be headed by Abraham G. Mills – a former President of the (American) National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs.

The commission appealed for "any American who had any knowledge concerning the origins of baseball" to come forward. They received a response from one Abner Graves, a 71–year–old mining engineer from Denver, Colorado. Graves claimed to have witnessed the formation of a game called base ball, played in 1839 by teams of students from two colleges in Cooperstown, New York, which had been devised by Abner Doubleday as an improved version of a local game called town ball. Doubleday, at the time, was a cadet at the US Military Academy, West Point; he would go on to be a major general on the Union side in the Civil War – firing (according to Wikipedia) the first shot in the defence of Fort Sumter, in the opening battle of the conflict.

The Mills Commission did not investigate Graves's claim. Instead, despite a number of circumstantial inconsistencies suggesting that the story was most likely fabricated (not to mention that fact that Doubleday himself, who had died in 1893, had never claimed to have invented the game), they published it immediately under the headline "Abner Doubleday Invented Base Ball".

A memo written by Mills, and known as the Mills Commission Report, remained "the authoritative document on the issue" for over half a century. But Wikipedia concludes that "The claim ... eventually garnered criticism from various writers. Modern baseball historians generally consider the myth to be false."