Abner Doubleday Invented Baseball

Doubleday did not invent baseball, and almost certainly never set foot in Cooperstown in 1839; he was a West Point cadet that year and left no mention of the game in his many writings. The story was manufactured by the Mills Commission, set up in the early 1900s specifically to prove baseball was purely American and not descended from English games. Their evidence rested largely on one elderly man's unreliable letter. Baseball actually evolved from older bat-and-ball games, especially the English game of rounders and various forms of 'base ball' already being played in the early 1800s, and the first formal rules came from Alexander Cartwright's club in 1845. So the Hall of Fame sits in a town chosen by a myth. Doubleday was a real Civil War general who fired an early shot at Fort Sumter. Inventing the national pastime just was not one of his achievements.