Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha

by Harvey Rachlin

  The trouble was, Graves assumed that the Abner Doubleday who came to Cooperstown was the same Abner Doubleday who had become a famous major general in the Civil War. Graves did go to school in Cooperstown with an Abner Doubleday, who was about the same age as Graves. However, this Abner Doubleday, the son of a Bruce Doubleday and a cousin of the major general, was an unlikely inventor of baseball in 1839, as he was only about six years old at the time.

  Abner Doubleday the major general was born in 1819 in Ballston Spa, New York, near Schenectady, about a two-day ride at the time from Cooperstown. Abner’s father was a bookseller, and when Abner was young his family moved to Auburn, New York, about eighty miles west of Cooperstown.

  Abner grew up in Auburn, and then attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. No records have surfaced of this Abner Doubleday ever having been in Cooperstown, and indeed he probably never visited the town. Doubleday was a student at West Point in 1839, and it is unlikely that he would have been able to take time off from his studies at the military academy to invent and play baseball. Doubleday graduated from West Point in 1842, and then his military career went into full gear; he entered the Civil War as a major and became famous for firing the first cannon shot in the Civil War on the Union side at Fort Sumter. There are no known contemporary accounts of Doubleday having played baseball or invented rules for it.

  Graves offered testimony to the Mills Commission but provided no concrete evidence supporting his assertions. When the Mills Commission asked for more information, Graves provided precise details almost seven decades after the event. It is possible that Graves, seeking attention, embellished his story for the fame he would earn from his purported association with the inventor of baseball, or even that he was manipulated to a degree by the Mills Commission. Graves may have initially referred to the younger Abner Doubleday as the inventor of baseball. Six years old is certainly too young to have invented sophisticated rules for a game like baseball, but not to have played it. So many years removed, Graves may have thought someone he played ball with had provided rules for the game, the name of his boyhood acquaintance Abner Doubleday then popping into his mind. When the Mills Commission members heard the name Abner Doubleday, of course they would think it was the famous major general of the Civil War and seize upon it being that Doubleday.

  The Mills Commission accepted Graves’s testimony of Doubleday as baseball’s inventor. What could have been more American than baseball, a game played during the Civil War, invented by a soldier in the war, and even the soldier who fired the cannon shot that began the war? As Albert Spalding would later write about Doubleday:

  The founder of our National Game became a Major General in the United States Army! The sport had its baptism when our country was in the preliminary agonies of a fratricidal conflict. Its early evolution was among the men, both North and South, who, during the war of the sixties, played the game to relieve the monotony of camp life in those years of melancholy struggle.

  Lending support to Graves’s claim was a man named Curry, a past president of the original New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, who stated that one day one of the team’s members, a man named Wadsworth, had brought a diagram showing the layout of the ball field. It so happened that Wadsworth had family from upstate New York, and A. G. Mills conjectured that Wadsworth had learned to play baseball the Doubleday way upstate and then taught Doubleday’s version of the game to the Knickerbockers. Wadsworth presumably worked in a customs house, and Mills tried unsuccessfully to track down Wadsworth’s records, which, he believed, would have shown him to have lived in Cooperstown.

  Abner Graves’s account was the Mills Commission’s best case for American authorship of the game. The mining engineer seemed to the Mills Commission to be a reliable witness, but not much was known about him—or his mental stability. Of course it couldn’t be known at this time that some two decades later Graves would have a dispute with his second wife over the sale of their house. He wanted to sell it, she didn’t. She owned the house, but that didn’t matter to Graves. He murdered his wife and spent the rest of his days in an insane asylum.

  At the end of 1907, the Mills Commission declared in a report (published in the 1908 Baseball Guide) that baseball was a sport indigenous to the United States with no ties to other games; and that Abner Doubleday, the American major general, had invented the sport of baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. Although the findings were bolstered by an alleged witness, Graves, they still lacked conclusive evidence that would confirm Doubleday as the originator of the sport. That evidence would come (in tenuous form) twenty-seven years later, in 1934.

  Indeed, the Mills Commission was the final arbiter in the debate over the origin of baseball. In a letter of December 30, 1907, to James E. Sullivan, Secretary of the Special Base Ball Commission, A. G. Mills wrote:

  I cannot say that I find myself in accord with those who urge the American origin of the game as against its English origin, as contended for by Mr. Chadwick, on “patriotic grounds”. In my opinion we owe much to our Anglo-Saxon kinsmen for their example which we have too tardily followed, in fostering healthful field sports generally, and if the fact could be established, by evidence, that our national game, “Base Ball”, was devised in England, I do not think that it would be any the less admirable nor welcome on that account. …

  Until my perusal of this testimony, my own belief had been that our game of Base Ball, substantially as played today, originated with the Knickerbocker Club of New York, and it was frequently referred to as the “New York Ball Game”.

  … In the last analysis, [Chadwick’s] contention is based chiefly upon the fact that, substantially, the same kind of implements are employed in the game of Base Ball as in the English game of “Rounders” to which he refers; for if the mere tossing or handling of some kind of a ball, or striking it with some kind of a stick, could be accepted as the origin of our game, then Father Chadwick would certainly have to go far back of Anglo-Saxon civilization,—beyond Rome, beyond Greece, at least to the palmy days of the Chaldean Empire! Nor does it seem to me that he can any more successfully maintain the argument because of the employment, by the English school boy of the past, of the implements or materials of the game.

  … In the interesting and pertinent testimony for which we are indebted to Mr. A. G. Spalding, appears a circumstantial statement by a reputable gentleman, according to which the first known diagram of the diamond, indicating positions for the players was drawn by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839. Abner Doubleday subsequently graduated from West Point and entered the regular army where, as Captain of Artillery, he sighted the first gun fired on the Union side (at Fort Sumpter [sic]) in the Civil War. Later still, he was in command of the Union army at the close of the first day’s fight in the battle of Gettysburg, and he died full of honors at Mendham, N.J., in 1893. … In the days when Abner Doubleday attended school in Cooperstown, it was a common thing for two dozen or more of school boys to join in a game of ball. Doubtless, as in my later experience, collisions between players in attempting to catch the batted ball were frequent, and injury due to this cause, or to the practice of putting out the runner by hitting him with the ball, often occurred.

  I can well understand how the orderly mind of the embryo West Pointer would devise a scheme for limiting the contestants on each side, and allotting them to field positions, with a certain amount of territory; also substituting the existing method of putting out the base runner for the old one of plugging him with the ball.

  I am also much interested in the statement made by Mr. Curry, of the pioneer Knickerbocker Club, and confirmed by Mr. Tassle, of the famous old Atlantic Club of Brooklyn, that a diagram, showing the ball field laid out substantially as it is today, was brought out to the field one afternoon by Mr. Wadsworth. … From that day to this, the scheme of the game described by Mr. Curry, has been continued with only slight variations in detail. It should be borne in mind that Mr. Curry was the first Presiden
t of the old Knickerbocker Club, and participated in drafting the first published rules of the game.

  It is possible that a connection more or less direct can be traced between the diagram drawn by Doubleday in 1839 and that presented to the Knickerbocker Club by Mr. Wadsworth in 1845, or thereabouts, and I wrote several days ago for certain data bearing on this point, but as it has not yet come to hand I have decided to delay no longer sending in the kind of paper your letter calls for, promising to furnish you the indicated data when I obtain it, whatever it may be.

  My deductions from the testimony submitted are:

  First. That Base Ball had its origin in the United States.

  Second. That the first scheme for playing it, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1839.

  The Mills Commission report was published in the spring of 1908. The commission, which in its report stated that it had relied on “a circumstantial statement by a reputable gentleman,” determined that baseball was American in origin and had been invented by Abner Doubleday, who had been a major general in the Civil War.

  Henry Chadwick, whose article about the origin of baseball had sparked the Mills Commission investigation, was appalled by the commission’s findings and immediately fired off a note of protest to Spalding. But the opinion of Chadwick, who died five weeks later, or anybody else who concurred with him, wouldn’t matter. Baseball was now certifiably an American game, created by an American. The findings of the Mills Commission were dutifully reported in the press. The New York World filed this story:

  The commission appointed to determine where base ball originated has reported, after a painstaking investigation covering three years, that the game was first played at Cooperstown, N.Y. under the direction of Abner Doubleday in 1839. … Their report settles an old controversy and is entitled to respect of all investigators of the origin of the horse or discoverers of “missing links.” Base ball is thus proved to be, like poker, a genuine American product. It did not come “out of the mysterious East,” like our religions and languages, like chess and cards, peaches and sherbert. It was not played in ancient Rome, like hop-scotch and jackstraws. It is native, indigenous, all our own, and the fact is a just subject for pride.

  On March 26, 1908, the citizens of Cooperstown, New York, learned possibly for the first time that their village had been the birthplace of America’s national sport when the Freeman’s Journal ran a front-page article with these headlines: “Home of Baseball,” “Game Originated in Cooperstown,” and “Abner Doubleday, Afterward Major General, Its Originator—A Monument Suggested.”

  The news no doubt surprised the residents, and they had to have been taken aback by the timing of the announcement. The previous year, 1907, had been the village’s hundredth anniversary. Townspeople had tried to draw tourists by touting the village’s literary heritage—it had been founded by William Cooper, the father of famed novelist James Fenimore Cooper— and held a summerlong celebration. If only they had known that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball on their fields sixty-eight years earlier, surely they could have attracted more visitors!

  With baseball codified as the invention of an American, the timing was ripe for Albert G. Spalding’s book, America’s National Game: Historic Facts Concerning the Beginning, Evolution, Development and Popularity of Base Ball with personal reminiscences of its vicissitudes, its victories and its votaries. The book reflected Spalding’s overflowing pride in America’s national pastime being a homegrown sport, but it also provided much information about the early days of baseball that would probably have been lost to posterity had Spalding not taken the time to write his book.

  How American is baseball? This is an issue Spalding addressed, and it would be hard to accuse him of being shy about expressing himself in this regard:

  I claim that Base Ball owes its prestige as our National Game to the fact that as no other form of sport it is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim, Vigor, Virility.

  Base Ball is the American Game par excellence, because its playing demands Brain and Brawn, and American manhood supplies these ingredients in quantity sufficient to spread over the entire continent.

  Spalding didn’t miss an opportunity to mock British gentility. Noting that cricket matches can sometimes take two or three days to complete, Spalding wrote that “cricket would never do for Americans; it is too slow.” But the Englishman “is so constituted by nature” to play such a “genteel game” for such a long time. Spalding continued:

  Our British Cricketer, having finished his day’s labor at noon, may don his negligee shirt, his white trousers, his gorgeous hosiery and his canvas shoes, and sally forth to the field of sport, with his sweetheart on one arm and his Cricket bat under the other, knowing that he may engage in his national pastime without soiling his linen or neglecting his lady. He may play Cricket, drink afternoon tea, flirt, gossip, smoke, take a whisky-and-soda at the customary hour, and have a jolly, conventional good time, don’t you know?

  Baseball, of course, was not a “genteel” game. Winning is what mattered, and, unlike the British, Americans didn’t mind getting down and dirty. Here’s Spalding on the difference between baseball and cricket:

  Cricket is a gentle pastime. Base Ball is War! Cricket is an Athletic Sociable, played and applauded in a conventional, decorous and English manner. Base Ball is an Athletic Turmoil, played and applauded in an unconventional, enthusiastic and American manner.

  Baseball at the time was of unchallenged popularity as an American sport, lapped up by kids across the country, and this fact also did not escape Spalding. He wrote:

  In every town, village and city is the local wag. He is a Base Ball fan from infancy. He knows every player in the League by sight and by name. He is a veritable encyclopaedia of information on the origin, evolution and history of the game. He can tell you when the Knickerbockers were organized, and knows who led the batting list in every team of the National and American Leagues last year. He never misses a game. His witticisms, ever seasoned with spice, hurled at the visitors and now and then at the Umpire, are as thoroughly enjoyed by all who hear them as is any other feature of the sport. His words of encouragement to the home team, his shouts of derision to the opposing players, find sympathetic responses in the hearts of all present.

  The Doubleday invention story was widely accepted after the Mills Commission report and received validation in 1934 when an old baseball with its seams torn apart was said to have been found in a trunk in an attic of a farmhouse in Fly Creek, New York, a hamlet about five miles west of Cooperstown. According to the story, a farmer from Fly Creek came to Cooperstown one day with a ball he had found in his house—the same house in which Abner Graves had once lived. Stephen C. Clark, a scion of a very wealthy local family who had an ownership interest in a local newspaper, purchased the ball for the sum of five dollars.

  Clark decided to display the ball—soon dubbed the “Doubleday Ball” by a newspaper editor—with other baseball memorabilia in a Cooperstown club room. Then a man named Alexander Cleland, a top administrator for Clark, conceived the idea for a full-fledged national baseball museum. Indeed, the time was ripe, if not overdue, for such a venture. By the mid-1930s, baseball was a classic sport that had grown in America from a national pastime to a national obsession, and as such it needed its own full-blown shrine. Current players such as Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean, Lefty Gomez, and Pie Traynor had captured the public’s imagination, while stars of past eras like Cap Anson, Kid Nichols, Nap Lajoie, and Ty Cobb were already part of the folklore of the sport. When plans were being made for a centennial celebration of baseball in Cooperstown, National League president Ford Frick suggested a hall of fame to fete the sport’s most illustrious participants. The two ideas became intertwined, and with Clark’s resources,
the concept came to life. On June 12, 1939, one hundred years to the day after the alleged invention of the sport by Abner Doubleday, a ceremony was held for the dedication of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown.

  The Doubleday Ball was the most important of the Hall of Fame’s artifacts, its Holy Grail, but some mystery attended its acquisition. The ball was presented almost from the start as an artifact that demonstrated the link between Doubleday and baseball by virtue of its discovery in the house of Abner Graves. But neither the name of the person who had found the ball nor the location of the farmhouse where it was discovered were ever publicized.

  Still, the story of the discovery of the Doubleday Ball may be true, and the ball could have been found in a house in which Abner Graves once lived. The Graves family did live in the Fly Creek area for several generations. And the ball was old, obviously from the nineteenth century, and indeed offered exciting possibilities for speculation about who had played with it.

  Who played with this nineteenth baseball? Its origins are uncertain but the so-called Doubleday Ball is symbolic of the beginning of the sport of baseball.

  The Doubleday Ball is small and is stuffed with cloth or cotton. From what is known about early balls, it is consistent with an early townball or early baseball. But it could also have been a toy. Many of these early balls were homemade and not sold at local stores. Farm families of the time had to be self-sufficient in many ways, and making a child’s ball would not have been uncommon, nor would it have been difficult.

  The Doubleday Ball has a sewn leather cover and has no component of rubber, which wasn’t readily commercially available until the 1840s. Based on its stuffing and other characteristics, the ball could have been made in the 1820s or 1830s. A child may have used the ball to play catch with. It is also possible that the Doubleday Ball is the oldest extant baseball in the United States, but such a claim cannot be made conclusively without knowing exactly when the ball was crafted.