Made In America - Bill Bryson [178]
By the early nineteenth century, ball games in America appear to have settled for the most part into a general form known as town ball, which came in two similar versions, the Massachusetts game and the New York game. The diverse etymologies of baseball terminology – innings, shortstop, outfielder and so on – indicate that the modern game arose not as an outgrowth of any particular sport but by borrowing and absorbing elements from a variety of games. The question is, who was responsible for melding these disparate elements into a unified game?
The traditional answer is Abner Doubleday. According to David Hackett Fischer, ‘Doubleday appears to have codified one of many sets of rules before 1840.’ Fischer notes that Doubleday did not invent baseball, but, he adds, ‘neither was his association mythical, as some revisionists have suggested’.26
In fact, it was entirely mythical.
Responsibility for the Doubleday legend rests ultimately with Albert Goodwill Spalding, who was an outstanding ball player and an astute businessman but an undiscriminating historian. After a brief but distinguished baseball career, Spalding opened a sporting goods store in Chicago, which grew into one of the world’s largest manufacturers of sports equipment. By 1903 he was a very wealthy man and a figure of godlike authority among baseball followers.
In that same year – the year that also saw the first modern World Series, the Wright Brothers’ first flight and the invention of the Model A car – Henry Chadwick, editor of the respected Baseball Guide, wrote a short history of the game in which he traced its probable origins to rounders and cricket. The patriotic Spalding was mortified at the thought that baseball might not be an all-American invention. After stewing over the matter for two years, in 1905 he appointed a six-man commission to look into the question. The commission was guided by A. G. Mills, president of the National League and, it so happened, a friend for thirty years of the recently deceased Abner Doubleday. In 1907 the commission issued a report in which it stated without substantiation that the game was created by Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. When pressed for details, Mills revealed that he had heard the story from ‘a reputable gentleman’ named Albert Graves, whose word he had accepted without question. (Graves would shortly end up in a lunatic asylum.)
To anyone who looked into the matter even slightly, it was obvious that the story didn’t hold water. For one thing, Doubleday was not at Cooperstown in 1839, but at West Point, and in any case his family had left Cooperstown in 1837. At his death, Doubleday had left sixty-seven diaries and not once in any of them did he mention baseball. Finally, if Mills’s story is to be believed, never in their thirty years of close friendship had Doubleday thought to mention to Mills that he had invented the game from which Mills was making his living.27
In so far as baseball can be said to have a founder, it is Alexander Cartwright, a member of the New York Knickerbocker Club who in 1845 drew up a set of rules based on the form of town ball known as the New York game. In its rudiments Cartwright’s version of the game was very like that of today. It incorporated nine-player teams and an infield in the shape of a diamond with bases ninety feet apart. Three strikes made an out, and three outs concluded a team’s at-bat.
But in its details the game that Cartwright and his immediate successors played was replete with differences. For one thing, fielders could put out opponents by catching the ball on the first bounce as well as on the fly, or by hitting them with the ball as they ran (an option that no doubt brought fielders the most pleasure if not the most outs). They wouldn’t wear protective gloves until the 1890s. Before that they caught balls barehanded or sometimes in their hats. The pitcher stood much closer to the batter than now, threw with an underhand delivery, and was required to keep offering pitches until the batter (an