Two years of haphazard information-gathering produced a ragged body of data unlikely to ratify either man’s theory. But amidst it all, Spalding found something he liked. A 71-year-old Denver mining engineer named Abner Graves wrote in 1905 two letters (one to the editor of the Akron, Ohio Beacon-Journal and the other to Spalding) recounting how, in his childhood home of Cooperstown, New York, a boy named Abner Doubleday surprised his playfellows one fine day with a concept for a game called “base ball.”[fn]The two letters, dated April 3 and November 17, 1905, are printed in David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), pp. 252-256.[/fn] Spalding must have been overjoyed when he realized that not only had he found an eyewitness account affirming baseball’s American origin, but that its purported inventor grew up to be a military hero in the Civil War![fn]For more on connections between Spalding and Doubleday, see Philip Block, “Abner and Albert, The Missing Link,” Chapter 3 (pp. 32-49) in David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It.[/fn] Lacking anything more substantive or suitable to their inquiry, Spalding and the commission ran with it.

Henry Chadwick passed away only a month after Spalding published his Doubleday blockbuster in March 1908, but there has never been any shortage of challenges to baseball’s singular Creation Myth.[fn]On the creation and debunking of the Doubleday Myth, see Robert W. Henderson, Ball, Bat and Bishop: The Origin of Ball Games (New York: Rockport Press, 1947; reprinted Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 170-194; David Block, Baseball before We Knew It, pp. 32-66; John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden:The Secret History of the Early Game (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp. 1-24.[/fn] Elementary fact-checking reveals the future General Doubleday to have been enrolled at West Point at the time of his alleged invention. Graves, we learn, was a man of questionable stability who later shot his wife and died in an asylum. Numerous accounts of earlier baseball activity have since been documented.

There remains a sense, nonetheless, that the old story cannot be wholly without substance. Even in the testimony of a great liar, there is usually some kernel of truth. The Doubleday legend may prove of value despite the shortsighted rubberstamping it received from a stacked jury a century ago, and what Abner Graves witnessed by the banks of Glimmerglass surely deserves a second look.

It was sometime in spring and probably in the year 1840 when a certain Abner Doubleday introduced a novel version of ballplay to his youthful peers.[fn]Graves never pinpointed 1839 as the year of Doubleday’s invention. In his first letter on the subject he said it was “either the spring prior or following the Log Cabin & Hard Cider campaign of General Harrison for President.” In his second letter he said it was “either 1839, 1840 or 1841.” The second letter provides an additional clue. Again referring to President William Henry Harrison, Graves states: “The incident has always been associated in my mind with the Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign of General Harrison, my father being a Militia Captain and rabid partisan of Old Tippecanoe.”[/fn] It is now known that two persons of that name lived in Cooperstown during Graves’s time there, and it is essential to consider both in trying to make sense of the legend.

The “famous” Abner, son of Ulysses Doubleday, had departed for West Point by September 1838 and was unlikely to have been indulging in idle recreation back in Cooperstown at the time in question. But he had a younger cousin, Abner Demas Doubleday, son of Ulysses’ brother, Demas. Abner Demas was born about six miles north in Pierstown in March 1829,[fn]Record for Abner Demas Doubleday at www.familysearch.org.[/fn] and so would have been 11 years old in spring 1840.

As for our eyewitness, Abner Graves, he was younger yet, having just turned six in February. It is certainly easier to envision him a playmate to the 11-year-old Doubleday than to the 20-year-old future major general.

Graves recalled “several of the best players of sixty years ago,” naming Thomas Bingham, Nelson Brewer, Joseph Chaffee, John Starkweather, and his own cousin John Graves, as well as another Doubleday cousin, John.[fn]Letter of Abner Graves to Beacon Journal of Akron, OH, April 3, 1905.[/fn] But perhaps the most significant other participant was Elihu Phinney, whose family had run a printing business in Cooperstown since the 1790s, and lived on a farm about half a mile up the west side of Lake Otsego. Graves specifically cited the Phinney Farm as a favored location for ballgames.[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Picture, then, Abner Demas directing a group of these boys, laying out a unique playing field in the meadow at Phinney Farm. Instead of just the two bases — the batter’s home and an out-goal to which he ran — used in the hybrid of Old Cat and Town Ball the Cooperstonians always played, there was now a circuit of four, marked by flat stones set in a diamond shape.[fn]All details concerning the manner of ballplay — both of the old “Town Ball” and the new “Base Ball” — are derived directly from the two letters of Abner Graves cited in footnote 1.[/fn]

To the disappointment of Abner Graves and the other youngest enthusiasts, this new version of ball does not allow for dozens of boys, all ages and sizes, to swarm about, colliding with each other in pursuit of fly hits. There are now but eleven players on the field at a time, in distinctly-assigned positions.

Four spread symmetrically across the outfield. Five man the infield: one at each base, then two extra within the basepaths — one between first base and second; another between second and third.

In their old Town Ball, a “tosser” would stand next to home base, throwing the ball straight upward for the batter to strike upon its fall. Doubleday’s plan puts this player in the center of the diamond, pitching underhand to the batsman. This necessitates a final fielder, the catcher, to stand behind home base and corral stray pitches.

Whereas, in Town Ball, every man tallied runs for himself, and the catcher of a fly ball went to bat no matter how many times he might have already batted, participants now are divided into two teams of equal number and bat in predetermined order. The batter must circle through three bases and reach home again in order to tally for his team.

In a holdover rule, “plugging” a runner with the ball is still good for a put-out. But a proviso declaring a batter out if he swings and misses at three pitches is new to the Cooperstown lads.

The frolic in Cooperstown that so impressed Abner Graves was undoubtedly but one of a myriad of early experiments — variations on a theme of bat and ball and bases. Taking his recollections at face value, however, tells us that the seeds of “The New York Game” were planted in the provinces five years before the Knickerbockers put their rules into writing. Glancing backward to that dim past we have conjured a mental snapshot, depicting a day when our game was very young, very free, and growing with great boyish eagerness toward its maturity.

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

This is a big topic, upon which I have written previously and will again. For the purposes of this book, let’s focus on October 1845.

The Knickerbockers, recently organized under that name after several years’ play at New York’s Madison Square and Murray Hill, played their first recorded game on October 6. Although they commenced formal play in brisk weather, the Knickerbockers managed to squeeze in 14 games before shutting down to await April 1846 and the opening of a new season. The scoring for these contests survives in their Game Book, held by the New York Public Library and, gloriously, readily available to researchers.

In the first intrasquad game, seven Knickerbockers won by a count of 11–8 over seven of their fellows in three innings. The rules calling for the victor to accumulate 21 runs over as many innings as that might take was, clearly, observed in the breach. Not for a dozen additional years would the rules of baseball require a set number of innings or players to the side, and these were at first settled upon as seven, not nine!

The umpire of this practice game was William Rufus Wheaton, who by his own account had reduced the rules of the Gotham Base Ball Club to writing in 1837. A skilled cricket player, Wheaton came to prefer baseball in the 1830s; his Gothams also went by the name Washingtons, signifying either their primacy among baseball clubs or their possible origin among the butchers and produce vendors of the Washington Market. As the years went by, the Gothams spawned offshoots, including both the New Yorks and the Knickerbockers. In 1887 Wheaton told a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, for a piece titled “How Baseball Began: A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It”:

The new game quickly became very popular with New Yorkers, and the numbers of the club soon swelled beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker. For a playground we chose the Elysian fields of Hoboken, just across the Hudson river. … We played no exhibition or match games [emphasis mine], but often our families would come over and look on with much enjoyment. Then we used to have dinner in the middle of the day, and twice a week we would spend the whole afternoon in ball play.

William H. Tucker, who in some unknown measure assisted Wheaton in laying down the Knickerbocker rules, played in ten of the 14 contests, including the one on October 6, in which he scored three of the losing squad’s eight runs. Like Wheaton and other Knickerbockers, he had been a player with the New York Ball Club and maintained a tie to them, indeed playing in two formal matches of the New Yorks with the Brooklyn Club on October 21 and 24 of 1845, a month after he had helped to form the Knicks. In his 1998 history of American cricket, Tom Melville pointed to an even earlier contest between these two clubs, on October 11 (actually October 10), reported in the New York Morning News. Research more than a decade later has revealed a somewhat fuller account in the obscure and short-lived newspaper the True Sun:

The Base Ball match between eight Brooklyn players, and eight players of New York, came off on Friday on the grounds of the Union Star Cricket Club. The Yorkers were singularly unfortunate in scoring but one run in their three innings. Brooklyn scored 22 and of course came off winners.

Wheaton also umpired the game of October 24, 1845, between New York and Brooklyn, and played in the game of November 10 to mark the second anniversary of the New York Club, which, like the recently discovered Magnolia Ball Club, had commenced play at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields in 1843 — two years before the Knickerbockers.

Many of the early New York baseballists had cut their teeth on cricket, and this was true of the Brooklyn players as well. In the game of October 21, conducted at the Elysian Fields, the Brooklyn Club (possibly not the same men who had played in the game of October 10, as no box score survives) were originally reported to be the victors once again, but this report proved an error. As was reported the next day, the eight players of the New York club won handily, and did so again in the game of October 24, played at the grounds of the Union Star Cricket Club, opposite Sharp’s Hotel in Brooklyn, at the corner of Myrtle and Portland Avenues, near Fort Greene. The scores were, respectively, 24–4 and 37–19. On both these occasions the Brooklyn club included established cricketers John Hines, William Gilmore, John Hardy, William H. Sharp, and Theodore Forman. Their lineup appears to have been identical for the two games, as the Ayers of October 21 and the Meyers of October 24 may be the same individual, while the other seven men match up.

There is more work to be done with all this, certainly, but the NYBBC anniversary match of November 10, 1845, seems to have much in common with the purported “first match game” of June 19, 1846, while the games of October 1845, particularly the latter two, seem to be true match games between differentiated clubs.

This essay was originally published in “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century” (2013), edited by Bill Felber. Download the SABR e-book by clicking here.

• Related link: Read “New York’s First Base Ball Club,” by John Thorn (2017 The National Pastime)