Who Invented Baseball
If you are a fan of the great game that is baseball, you may be wondering, who invented baseball? Common lore credits the invention of baseball to a man named Abner Doubleday in the early 1800s; however, this popular myth is not accepted by baseball historians. The actual origins of baseball are less spontaneous, involving an evolution from older games of bat and ball. This article will explore the current thinking regarding the origins of baseball.
In 1905, the Mills Commission, chaired by the fourth president of the National League, Abraham G. Mills, was appointed to determine the origins of baseball. The Commission concluded that "the first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.” Doubleday was an officer in the United States Army, and subsequently, the Union Army during the American Civil War; rising to the rank of colonel, he participated in some of the key battles of the war.
Though Major League Baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY support the legend of Abner Doubleday’s invention of baseball, the evidence that is available disputes this claim. There is no record of Doubleday himself ever claiming to have any role in the development of baseball; furthermore, he was not in fact present in Cooperstown at the time he supposedly invented baseball there, being instead a cadet at the West Point Military Academy. Though his family had lived in Cooperstown, they had moved away from the town the year before Doubleday was said to have invented baseball.
In fact, baseball is a member of a family of games, of which the most notable member in the modern world, aside from baseball itself (and its cousin softball), is Cricket. Games of bat and ball are known to have existed as far back as the 1300s; baseball itself is regarded as having evolved from earlier English games such as Cricket and Rounders, though the precise origins are murky. There were competing claims from American and English camps in the 1800s regarding the extent to which baseball is uniquely American. It cannot be disputed, however, that while baseball has similarities to these other games, there are many unique features of baseball which distinguish it from its predecessors.
The game that we would recognize as baseball is known to have been played by 1845, though official rules weren’t codified until 1857. In this year, sixteen baseball clubs from New York City met to standardize the rules, agreeing to a set of rules close to the rules of the Knickerbocker Club. The first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed in 1969. The team that would eventually become today’s Cincinnati Reds of Major League Baseball recruited from amateur players of the time and was not defeated until 1870.
Who Invented Baseball? |
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