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Baseball Diamond - Who Invented Baseball?
The Case for Alexander Cartwright
The Case For Abner Doubleday

 

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What are diamonds made of? How are they related to volcanism? What are indicator minerals?
Baseball had first taken root on this continent in the mid 1700's when English lads brought an offshoot of the game of cricket to our shores. This game, where the fielders put out a runner by belting him with the ball as he ran from base to base, was called Rounders.

There were many variations of Rounders as the game had no "official" rules. It was usually played according to local custom, meaning the number of players on a side, the number of bases (usually anywhere from two to five), the way they were laid out, the distance between them and other rules would vary from place to place. It was basically a pickup game that was played by children.

This woodcut was originally published in the United States in 1820 in a book called "Children' s Amusements"

In 1845, in New York City, the 25 year old Alexander Cartwright took various elements that were used in these different forms of early baseball and, adding a few wrinkles of his own, fused them into regulations that stand today.

Cartwright gave us the baseball diamond and specified the distance between the bases (a measurement that we still use now) ... he did away with the practice of hitting the runner with the ball to achieve an out and replaced this with either tagging the runner with the ball or getting it to the base ahead of him.. he specified the number of players on the field and invented the position of shortstop... he decided there would be three outs per side and the ball would be considered foul if knocked out of the ninety degree quadrant of the field... And these were just some of the things that Cartwright included when he wrote out baseball's first standardized set of rules.

Most importantly, Alexander Cartwright's rules and regulations added elements of precision, perfection, drama, and excitement to the game, as he almost single-handedly transformed a simple children's game into a game that adults could play!

So, forget anything you ever heard about Abner Doubleday, it was, in fact, Alexander Cartwright Jr. who gave us the great game of baseball...

In 1904... Al Spalding, the former major league pitching ace who had since gone on to become a baseball executive and a wealthy manufacturer of sporting equipment, decided that it was demeaning that this great American pastime had found it's origin in an English children's game called Rounders. So, the following year, he assembled some like minded friends, including two U.S. Senators, and had them establish themselves as a commission to look into the origins of baseball... with their ultimate purpose being, if possible, to give it an American ancestry. And that's just what they did!

The commission, which was chaired by former National League president A.G. Mills had apparently never heard of Alexander Cartwright, or if they did, completely ignored him and declared a deceased American Army General and Civil War hero by the name of Abner Doubleday to be the inventor of baseball. Unfortunately, the commission had no real evidence to support this conclusion, as a matter of fact there has never been any real evidence that Doubleday had much, if anything, to do with baseball.

The commission based their findings on a letter they had received from an elderly man by the name of Abner Graves who claimed to have been a boyhood friend of Doubleday's.

Graves, a mining engineer from Colorado who was well into his eighties, stated in his letter that; sometime around 1839 (as he put it "either the spring prior to or following the 'Log Cabin and Hard Cider' campaign of General William H. Harrison for the presidency"), he had seen Doubleday directing some "20 to50 boys" around in a Cooperstown N.Y. school yard while they were playing a game of Town Ball, which was a form of Rounders. Because, as Graves claimed, Doubleday had the boys form themselves into teams with eleven players on each side, and that four bases had been used in the game, Graves was convinced that he had been witnessing the actual invention of baseball.

Even though the game Graves described involved the practice of "soaking" runners, or throwing the ball at them to get an out... and the fact that Town Ball had been played in North America for at least seventy-five years prior to 1839, sometimes with definite sides or teams, and sometimes with just one player against the whole school yard, using any number of bases... and furthermore, the fact that Doubleday never in his whole life had been known to even utter the word baseball apparently made no difference to the commission. They accepted Grave's story and, in 1907, declared Abner Doubleday, as the game's inventor.

Doubleday, the gallant Civil War hero, had turned out to be a convenient figurehead for the commission, in their quest to give the game an all-American heritage.

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Ever Hear the Name Spalding?

 

 

 

 

It could be said of Al Spalding, that, he never met an opportunity to make money out of baseball that he didn't like. Born in Byron Illinois in 1850, Albert Goodwill Spalding grew up to become a star pitcher in baseball's first professional league, the National Association. (From 1871 to 1875, pitching for the Boston Red Stockings he won 207 games and lost only 56... an average of 41 wins per season!)

When the National League came into being in 1876, Spalding initially managed the Chicago club, and then went on to become an executive with the team and then eventually owner of the franchise. He was one of baseball's great entrepreneurs. In 1876, along with his brother and brother in law, he established the firm of A.G. Spaldlng and Brothers which started out as a sporting goods store in Chicago and then evolved into a major manufacturer of sporting goods.

Spalding had no qualms about using his influence as a baseball executive to promote his business (among other things he gave the National League free baseballs, and even paid them a dollar for each dozen they used, in turn for the league designating his ball as the "official" ball of the league... this, of course, helped to create a great demand for Spalding baseballs by the public.

He also became the publisher of the "Official League Book" which carried league rules, and additionally he published "Spalding's Official Base-Ball Guide", an annual collection of team and individual records which was known to feature articles which pushed Spalding's viewpoint on many baseball issues... and helped to sell massive amounts of Spalding sporting equipment.

As a baseball executive he helped to work out the territorial scheme that kept clubs from competing with each other for the same fans, and was instrumental in breaking up the Player's Brotherhood, which had called for the first players' strike in 1890.

Al Spalding organized the great world baseball tour of 1888-89, where he took his Chicago club and players from other teams on a tour around the world in order to promote the great American game of baseball. On the six month junket they visited such places as Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, Prance and Britain. They played some 42 games before an estimated 200,000 people, and the game itself generally received mixed reviews. After witnessing a baseball exhibition at London's Kensington Oval, Britain's Prince of Wales stated that baseball was "an excellent game" although he considered cricket to be "superior".

Spalding partially retired from baseball in 1901, when he moved to California, joined a religious cult and eventually made an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate.

Spalding also helped to create and promote the ridiculous Doubleday Myth. In 1905, acting on his own authority, Spaldlng put together a commission to investigate the origin of baseball. He remained behind the scenes, pulling all the strings, and two years later this commission came to the remarkable conclusion that a deceased Civil War hero by the name of Abner Doubleday had invented baseball when in fact Doubleday had never, in his whole life, had anything whatsoever to do with the game. Spalding died in Point Loma California in 1915. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.