"A" is NOT for Abner. The Doubleday Doubletake...

In my last post, I giant slalomed through the gates of rule book logic to debunk the old saying that “the tie goes to the runner.”  Although we know the rule book is a living breathing thing which keeps evolving, like with last year's change outlawing the old third-to-first spaghetti move, when you look at the proverbial forest through the trees, the rules make sense most of the time - much of which goes back to the original Kickerbocker Rules of the mid-nineteenth century.  As we salivate in anticipation of spring training games so we can again focus on the action, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back and tell you about another surprising myth about baseball.

I speculate in my book “The Rules Abide” that the very early baseball games must have been like backyard whiffle ball games where you make things up as you go: double in the trees, triple off Mr. Murray’s Buick, and so on.  I imagine that in the very first attempted baseball game, the hurler quick pitched the batter on the very first pitch.  After a pithy argument about pitching protocol, the second pitch probably buzzed Casey-at-the-bat.    -   “Bejabbers! If you knock the striker with that ball, he should ripple the current over to the first square as retribution"  -   Without regulations, everything was up for grabs because if there is one sad constant, it's that if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying hard enough.  That is until someone decided it might be in the game’s best interest to put some simple rules in place to standardize a structure that would allow the game to play out in a fair and controlled manner.  That someone was you-know-who, Alexander Cartwright, the man officially recognized as the father of baseball.

Who's Cartwright? "I'm Cartwright!"

What'chu talkin' 'bout Willis? You thought it was Abner Doubleday?

Most of us give credit to Doubleday as such, his name synonymous with baseball ever since a 1907 report, commissioned by the National League, which identified him as the founder of baseball. Doubleday however, a Civil War general from the north, never claimed to have invented baseball and no reference to the game was ever found in any of his letters or papers discovered after his death.  Cartwright, on the other hand, a New York fireman by trade, founded the Knickerbocker Baseball Club, introduced the first formal rule set, including the field layout, and organized the very first official baseball game, reported to have been played on June 19, 1846 in Hoboken, New Jersey where the “New York Nine” ironically trounced his club 23-1.  While the exact genealogy of baseball is subject to debate, The Knickerbocker Rules of 1845 signified that baseball had made the transition from an amalgamation of earlier folk games to that of a widely recognized and popular sport that would, as soon as 1856, be referred to as “America’s National Pastime.”  Over time, opinions among historians shifted and the tipping point came in 1953 when the United States Congress officially declared Cartwright as the “Inventor of Baseball.”  Next time you visit the Hall of Fame, make sure you take in some action at the beautiful Doubleday Field, named after Cooperstown's own Civil War hero, but remember, "A" is not for Abner!

If you've come this far, please subscribe at top right to ensure future blog deliveries
Thank You.