from the village. This ball, people in Cooperstown began to speculate, might, indeed, have been the game’s first. The misshapen ball, which became known as the “Doubleday Baseball,” was purchased by a wealthy local resident named Stephen Clark, who displayed it in town.
If baseball had been invented in Cooperstown in 1839, as the Mills Commission determined, then its centennial was fast approaching. Clark and several baseball officials, including National League President Ford C. Frick, and American League President William Harridge, began planning an event that would mark the anniversary. Frick proposed a Hall of Fame shrine in Cooperstown. In 1936, the first Hall of Fame election was held and five inductees were chosen: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Matthewson, and Walter Johnson. By then, the mythology of American baseball had been enhanced by such stars as Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx. The low-scoring, so-called “dead ball era” of 1900 to 1919 had given way to the home-run era of the 1920s, when, for various reasons, baseball became a much more exciting, and lucrative, spectator sport. The proliferation of radio in the 1930s further boosted baseball’s fortunes. Everyone, it seemed, followed the game. Baseball players were national heroes, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, which opened in Cooperstown on June 12, 1939, seemed a fitting monument to America’s game.
AMERICA’S GAME
The only real problem with the Mills Commission report was that its findings were completely bogus. The “best evidence” cited in the report was actually based on a single source: the testimony of a seventy-one-year-old Colorado miner named Abner Graves, who claimed to have witnessed Doubleday invent the game back in 1839, when Graves was a five-year-old living in Cooperstown.
Doubleday, though, was not actually in Cooperstown during 1839; he was a cadet at West Point for the whole year. He went on to become a national war hero, seeing action in the Mexican-American War, the Seminole Wars, and the Civil War where, as a Union general, he played a key role in the Battle of Gettysburg. When Doubleday died in 1893, there was no mention in his New York Times obituary of baseball. Nor did he write about baseball in any of the sixty-seven diaries that he left behind.
Although the Mills report described Graves as “a reputable character,” other accounts cast him as a fanciful storyteller. Toward the end of his life, Graves shot and killed his second wife, and he spent his final days in a mental institution.
The objective of the Mills Commission—most of whose members were friends of Spalding’s—wasn’t to settle the controversy over baseball’s origins so much as it was to quiet it down. Their report accomplished that, even though its findings are no longer taken seriously. The National Baseball Hall of Fame, which wouldn’t be where it is without the report, even has an exhibit discrediting the Mills Commission. But in many ways it had the elements of a perfect yarn—that baseball had been invented in a small, idyllic lakeside village in rural America, in a town founded by Judge William Cooper, the father of Leatherstocking Tales author James Fenimore Cooper; and that its creator had been an American war hero, who was no longer around to comment on it one way or the other. Although the story had no more basis in fact than Parson Weems’ account of George Washington chopping down his father’s cherry tree, it fed into the mythology of baseball—and literally created a shrine to the sport. It had been Spalding’s goal to show that baseball had “an American dad.” The Mills Commission did that, at least for a while.
The Mills Commission report came along during a pivotal decade for America’s national sport—when the American League doubled the size of baseball to sixteen teams (a number that would hold until 1961) and the World Series was begun. It was also the decade when the ball cap became standardized. The baseball cap was one of the features that gave the sport its distinctive look. Baseball was, and still is, the only American sport with an official uniform that includes a cap.
Gradually, baseball historians chipped away at the Cooperstown myth. In 1953, the United States Congress credited Alexander Cartwright with “inventing” baseball in the 1840s. Cartwright, a bookseller and fireman, had started the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in New York in 1842 and four years later drew up a set of rules that many believe established modern-day baseball. On June 19, 1846, the first officially organized American baseball match was played at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields between the New York Base Ball Club and the Knickerbockers (the New York Base Ball Club won 23–1, with Cartwright umpiring).
But, in truth, baseball’s origins substantially pre-date 1846—or 1839, for that matter. Several years ago, the first known documented use of the term “base-ball” in the United States was discovered at Pittsfield, Massachusetts—in the form of a 1791 ordinance, banning the play of “base ball” within eighty yards of the town square, “for the Preservation of the Windows in the new Meeting House.” When the ordinance was discovered, Pittsfield Mayor James Ruberto proclaimed, “Pittsfield is baseball’s Garden of Eden.” Mentions of “base-ball” also appear in American newspapers from the 1820s.
The earliest known reference to baseball came from England, though, in a 1744 children’s book called A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. A German book on sports games, published in 1796, included a section on “English base-ball.” And Jane Austen’s first novel, written in 1798 and 1799, contained this sentence: “No more cricket, no more base-ball, they are sending me to Geneva.” Most baseball historians now agree that baseball was adapted from English bat-and-ball games.
Perhaps the real origins of baseball go back even earlier, though. On a wall at the National Baseball Hall of Fame is a 1251 AD drawing of Spaniards playing a game with a ball and bat, which bears a superficial resemblance to baseball. Next to it is another, much older image, a wall relief from the shrine of Hathor, in a temple at Deir-el-Bahari, Egypt. It shows Thutmose III, a pharaoh who ruled Egypt in the fifteenth century BC, holding a ball in one hand and a long, wavy-looking stick in the other. The hieroglyphic over the image says, “Batting the ball for Hathor.”
Peter Piccione, an Egyptologist and professor of comparative ancient history at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, gives a talk titled “Pharaoh at the Bat” about this early game. Piccione believes that the Egyptians were the first people to play “bat-and-ball” games.
Of course, there are no known stats on Thutmose III, who became Egypt’s ruler as a boy and reigned for almost fifty-four years. Nor is there any footage of Thutmose and his cronies playing ball. But one can sort of imagine it: The youthful Thutmose stepping up to the plate, wearing his customary kilt and headdress (first precursor to the baseball cap). He is a slightly rotund young man with spindly legs, whom the workers call “Babe” because of his boyish looks. He points his wavy-looking bat in the direction of the Pyramid of Giza and calls his shot.
Swings at the first pitch.
The workers turn.
It’s going …
They begin to run.
Going …
Back, back, back …
It’s …
Alexander Cartwright (top center), with members of the New York Knickerbockers. In 1849, the Knickerbockers wore the first recorded baseball uniform, which included straw hats.
THE NATIONAL SPORT’S CAP
Even if baseball’s origins were not truly American, we adopted baseball and made it our own. Similarly, the baseball cap, which went through various trials before becoming standardized, borrowed elements of existing caps.
The first official baseball uniform was that worn by the New York Knickerbockers on April 24, 1849. Records show that
