THE FOUNDER OF THE BASEBALL

Abner Doubleday Invented Baseball. This very common myth of baseball credits Doubleday with inventing the game, supposedly in Elihu Phinney’s cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. In 1905, a committee was appointed to investigate the origins of the game, their conclusion was:
“the first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. [In] the years to come, in the view of the hundreds of thousands of people who are devoted to baseball, and the millions who will be, Abner Doubleday’s fame will rest evenly, if not quite as much, upon the fact that he was its inventor … as upon his brilliant and distinguished career as an officer in the Federal Army.”In fact, this conclusion was based on the testimony of one man, who was of questionable credibility. Jeff Idelson of the Baseball Hall of Fame has said that baseball was not really invented anywhere, but as far as history is concerned, the first written rules of baseball were penned by Alexander Joy Cartwright for the baseball club The Knickerbockers. On June 3, 1953, Congress officially credited Cartwright with inventing the modern game of baseball.