Abner Doubleday Story Is True.  And It’s Ours

The Freeman’s Journal/Hometown Oneonta, June 2014

During Stalin’s show trials – old-line Bolsheviks were brought to the dock in Moscow in 1937-38, accused of treason – a wide-eyed reporter for a Western news agency asked a hardened oldtimer, A.T. Cholerton of the London-based Daily Telegraph: Are the accusations true?

As the story goes, Cholerton replied: Yes.  Everything is true, except the facts.

Why does this bring the Abner Doubleday story to mind on this 75th anniversary of the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s first induction?  Turn Cholerton’s aphorism around:  Except for the facts of the Doubleday story, everything is true.

It’s been said, if Cooperstown didn’t exist – and by extension, Abner Doubleday – baseball would have had to invent it.  And so it is.

A quick recap is in order.

It was the Mills Commission, formed to determine the origins of baseball, that announced on Dec. 30, 1907, that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in the Phinney pasture, now the site of Doubleday Field.

The commission ruled Doubleday “had invented the word ‘baseball,’ designed the diamond, indicated fielders’ positions, and written the rules,” the Wikipedia entry relates.  Then it goes on: “No written records in the decade between 1839 and 1849 have ever been found to corroborate these claims, nor could Doubleday be interviewed (he died in 1893).”

The commission based its findings on the recollections of Abner Graves of Denver, Colo., who spent four years in Cooperstown around 1839.  A few years later, Graves shot his wife and spent his final years in an insane asylum.  How interesting is that?

Still, Abner Doubleday certainly played baseball as a young man.  And, as any veteran of sandlot baseball knows, there’s always a dominant young personality who makes up the rules as the game goes along.  Given his later career, rising to general in the Civil War and beyond, he was certainly a leader among his young peers.

A memory comes to mind of annual summertime wiffle ball games.  The rule was, when players could no longer see the ball, the game was over.  If his team was behind, one dominant personality, let’s call him George, would call out, “I can see it, I can see it,” well past dusk, until his team gained the advantage or mothers would call their boys to late suppers from the back stoop.

Abner was certainly a George, issuing rulings as games ensued on corner lots.  Arguably, Abner Doubleday didn’t NOT invent baseball; rather, hundreds and thousands of Abner Doubledays, together, across the nation, invented baseball as we know it today.

These days, you often hear the term, “Abner Doubleday Myth,” and it’s meant dismissively.  But it’s wrong to equate “myth” with “untruth.” Myths – creation myths, for instance, that are found in every society on earth – are indicators of a deeper truth about the societies from which they emerge.

So it is with the Abner Doubleday story.  The “facts” were always in doubt, so it’s interesting that they were embraced, held to fast, for generations.  It’s only been in the last quarter-century that the literalists gained the upper hand.

Let’s turn the tide.

It’s time to understand the deeper truth in the Doubleday story.  And, happily, no community has greater access to people who understand the meaning of “folklore,” if you will, than Cooperstown.  The Cooperstown Graduate Program and The Farmers’ Museum, certainly, have access to resources to explain why baseball’s creation myth is as powerful as any.

There’s a profound thesis there, or symposium, or study.  As powerful as any, and it’s ours.  Let’s not run away from it, as we’ve been doing.  Let’s understand the Doubleday story and celebrate it once again.

Another story.

When the son was a boy, he and his dad would toss around a baseball every evening, back and forth, tens of thousands of times, until the light grew dim and, yes, George, it indeed was too dark to see it.

The boy grew into a teen and, as boys do, he sought an independence far beyond his father.  And then, the other afternoon, on cleaning the back porch together, they ran across a bucket and, inside, were two gloves and a baseball (plus a couple of ice-fishing tip-ups.)

A toss and a catch.  A toss and a catch.  And soon the two were back in the old-time rhythm.  The memories flowed, of the cool spring evenings in the backyard, of the throw and the slap, as the red sky turned grey and evening descended.

Yes, Abner Doubleday lives indeed.