God bless Abner Doubleday.
Who
didn't actually lay out the game. It was a myth begun by a fellow named A.G. Mills, who commissioned a 1905 study to determine the game's origin after a former player-turned-sporting goods tycoon, Albert Spalding, who objected to the thought that baseball might have evolved from England's rounders and cricket and wanted affirmation that it was a purely American creation. Not only was Doubleday not even present in Cooperstown in 1839, the year he supposedly invented the game (he was stationed at West Point at the time), but his obituary upon his death in 1893 made a point of mentioning that he actually didn't much like outdoor sports---even though he did provide baseball equipment for troops under his command as an off-duty recreation. (Doubleday was a Civil War general and the man who ordered the first shot of that war defending Fort Sumter, the war's first battle.)
A man named Abner Graves, a Denver mining engineer, submitted a letter to Mills's commission claiming Doubleday as baseball's creator. But nobody bothered to fact-check Graves's claims and, in fact, he died in 1926 . . . in an insane asylum. Baseball may actually not have a single inventor, properly defined, but it was Alexander Cartwright who first came up with the rules---including the infield, basepath, and mound distance dimensions---that basically defined the game as we've come to know it. Cartwright did that in 1845; a year later, the first known and recorded baseball game played under the Cartwright rules, between the New York Knickerbockers and the New York Nine, was played in a park known as the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J. The most positive outcome of the Doubleday myth is Cooperstown being the home, of course, of the Hall of Fame.
Abner Doubleday had as much to do with the creation of baseball as Herbert Hoover had to do with the invention of the portable vacuum cleaner. (Which was created, by the way, by an Ohio janitor named Murray Spangler, whose battles with asthma inspired him to rig up a fan tied to a revolving sweeping brush and augmented by an oversize pillow case that anyone could use. His cousin-in-law spotted it, liked it, and, realising Spangler couldn't afford to produce it en masse on his own, turned his leather goods operation into a massively successful vacuum cleaner manufacturer beginning in 1908. The cousin-in-law was Bill Hoover, no relation to either the future president or the future FBI director, and Lord knows J. Edgar Hoover sucked . . .)
Baseball began in a bright green field with an ancient name when this country was new and raw and without shape, and it has shaped America by linking every summer from 1846 to this one, through wars and depressions and seasons of rain.
Baseball is one of the few enduring institutions in America that has been continuous and adaptable and in touch with its origins. As a result, baseball is not simply an essential part of this country; it is a living memory of what American culture at its best wishes to be.
The game is quintessentially American in the way it puts the premium on both the individual and the team; in the way it encourages enterprise and imagination and yet asserts the supreme power of the law. Baseball is quintessentially American in the way it tells us that, much as you travel and far as you go, out to the green frontier, the purpose is to get home, back to where the others are, the pioneer ever striving to come back to the common place. A nation of migrants always, for all their wandering, remembers what every immigrant never forgets: that you may leave home but if you forget where home is, you are truly lost and without hope.---A. Bartlett Giamatti, from "Men of Baseball, Lend an Ear,"
The New York Times, 1981.
Giamatti knew the deep national need for 90-foot baselines and 60-foot-6-inch pitching lanes, and three-strikes-you're-out-at-the-old-ball-game. He knew that the occasional eccentric whose passion tended toward stamp collecting or opera or gardening or computer hacking or football probably breathed easier from the exhibitions of March to the Series of October, secure that there was a ball game going on somewhere.
It was a tribute to Giamatti, who died Friday, that most journals and broadcasts honored him, in their rapidly assembled obituaries, as a human being first, and a scholar and administrator and writer before he ever became a baseball official.
When he first assumed the presidency of the National League, there was the tendency of some to patronize him as the nutty professor on sabbatical. This columnist, who saw Giamatti as a gravely serious man, once jested in print that a minor National League decision be rendered in Haiku, the Japanese 17-syllable poetry form. Giamatti referred to it years later, clearly not amused. Besides, his specialty was Dante . . .
At the very least, the [Pete] Rose affair kept Giamatti from sitting in the stands very often. He did get to see Nolan Ryan record his 5,000th strikeout last month in Texas, ticking off at least one Oakland player who thought he detected Giamatti rooting for Ryan.
Giamatti knew that baseball is about rooting, about caring. Let us envision him on the edge of his seat, a smile softening his gray beard and somber eyes, his fists itching to pump the air as Ryan blew his heater past Rickey Henderson. Let us picture him in Seattle or in Atlanta, suffering with the home fans, or back in Fenway, letting his true passions out.
As long as he was commissioner, there would have been the chance he would act and speak out of his convictions, and that these would have made him the ultimate steward of the national game.---George Vecsey, from "The Commissioner Who Went One-for-One,"
The New York Times, 3 September 1989.
