Baseball Orgin Controversy

Baseball Origin Controversy

Based on old American fokelore, baseball's storied invention was by a young West Point cadet named Abner Doubleday. In the summer of 1839, in Cooperstown, New York, Doubleday supposedly started the game of baseball. Because of numerous types of baseball, or rather games similar to it, the orgian of the game has been disputed for decades by sports historians all over the world. In 1839, in Cooperstown, New York, Doubleday supposedly started the game of baseball. Doubleday, also a famous Union general during the Civil War, was said to be the inventor of baseball by Abner Graves, an elderly minor from New York. In response to the question of where baseball first originated, major league

owners summoned a committee

e in 1907. Abner Graves stepped before the committee

and gave his testimony. In Graves' account of "the first game," the Otsego Academy and Cooperstown's Green's Select School played against ne another in 1839. Committeemean Alber G. Spalding, the founder of Spalding's Sporting Goods, favored Graves' declaration and convinced the other committee

emen that Grave's account was true. As a result, in 1939, the committee

and the State of New York named Cooperstown and Abner Doubleday as the birthplace and the inventor.

Today, many baseball historians still doubt the testimony of Abner Graves. Historians say the story came from the crative memeory of one very old man and wa spread by a superpatriotic sporting goods manufacturer, determinded to preove that

baseball was a wholly American invention. According to Doubleday's diary, he was not plying badeball in Cooperstown, but attending school at West Point on that day in 1839. Also, historians have found that nowhere in doubleday's diary has he ever "claimed to have had anything to do with baseball, and may never have even seend a game." this leads many to the conclusion that Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball, but it is still a disputed and active issue. Sports Historians have presented impressive evidence showing that American baseball, far from being an independent invention, evolved out of various ball and stick games that ahd been played in many areas of the world since the beginning of recorded history. But in early America, precursors of baseball included informal gmes of English origin such as paddleball, trap ball, rounders, and town ball. The latter was a popular game in colonial New England and was played by adults and children with a bat and ball on an open field.

Printed references to "base ball" in America date back to the eighteenth century. Among these accounts is one of Albigence Waldo, a surgeon with George Washington's troops at Valley Forge who told stories of soldiers batting balls and running bases in their

free time. Similarly in 1834 Robin Carvers's Book of Sports related that an American version of rounders called "base" or "goal ball" was rivaling cricket in popularity among Americans. Indeed, cricket played a role in the evolution or organized baseball. From this British game came umpires and innings,