Baseball in the Garden of Eden

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a commission was formed to determine the origins of baseball. Laughably, the word of a man who grew up in Cooperstown, New York was taken at face value. He said, that, in 1939, a young man named Abner Doubleday drew up the diamond, set the rules, and a sport was born. This man's name was Abner Graves, and he was five years old at the time. No matter that Doubleday was at West Point at the time, or never made any mention of baseball during of after his illustrious military career (which included Gettysburg). Nonetheless, this was the story, and they stuck to it, and Cooperstown became the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

Over the years, the Doubleday myth has been exposed, but John Thorn, in his book Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, claims that there are more myths about the creation of the game. He doesn't precisely know who invented baseball, there isn't one person, but he certainly says who doesn't, which includes Alexander Joy Cartwright, who is a member of the Hall of Fame. Thorn says that everything on his plaque, including his establishment of the length of the base paths, the number of players, etc. is not true.

Thorn is the official historian of Major League Baseball, and I had a chance to meet him at the New York Mets conference at Hofstra University some months back. He has written extensively on the subject of the beginnings of baseball, a miasma of myth and conjecture. "In no field of American endeavor is invention more rampant than in baseball, whose whole history is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community, and fair play."

Thorn writes that baseball was played long before Abner Doubleday supposedly created it in 1839. A notice in a Pittsfield, Massachusetts newspaper indicated that it was banned from being played near windows. There is a mention of it in Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey. It evolved from a variety of bat and ball games, going back to the ancient Egyptians. Henry Chadwick, an early and important voice of baseball (he is in the Hall of Fame) always claimed that it was a variation of an English game called rounders. This earned the enmity of Albert Spalding, an early player and later a sporting goods magnate (he is in the Hall), who was determined to prove that it was an American creation.

Many bubbles are burst in this book, foremost the legend of Cartwright. Thorn notes that his anointment as the "Father of Baseball" is nonsense. Cartwright did play for the Knickerbockers, the first club to lay down rules for the game, but they were not the first to play it. Cartwright's induction into the Hall of Fame was largely the work of lobbying by his son and grandson. Completely ignored was Louis Wadsworth, whom Thorn states was the man who came up with nine men on a team, nine innings, and possibly the diamond which we know today. Wadsworth was alive during the Mills Commission, but was in a sanitarium, with no family. Perhaps Thorn's work will get him a plaque in the Hall.

Beyond the origins of the game, Thorn's book covers the history of the formation of professional baseball up to the turn of the century. He notes that the Cincinnati Red Stockings, long believed to be the first professional team, were in fact not. But the country was baseball mad in those days, with the first baseball cards, games, magazines and other ephemera selling like hotcakes. We also learn that labor issues were endemic to the game even back then, as was corruption, as players in the 1880s were kicked out for throwing games for gamblers.

There is also an interesting thread involving a movement called Theosophists, which connects Spalding, Doubleday, and the Mills Commission. I must admit I didn't quite understand the meaning of it all, and was surprised to read a book about baseball which discussed the mystic Madame Blavatsky.

Those who don't get baseball are often tired by proclamations of baseball being representative of America and a religion unto itself; those people are likely to be baffled by this book. But for those who do get it, and bleed for it, sentences like these will ring true: "With baseball busting out all over, to describe it as the national pastime no longer provoked a smirk among the knowing, as it had in the 1850s. In fact baseball had become more than than the mere reflection of our rising industrial and political power and our propensity for bluster and hokum: The national game was beginning to supply emblems for democracy, commerce, and community that would subtly change American forevermore. In our determinedly secular nation, a fan's affiliation with his team could exceed in vigor his attachment to his creed, his trade, his political party, all but family and country, and increasingly even these were wrapped up in baseball. The national pastime became the great repository of national ideals, the symbol of all that was good in American life: fair play...the rule of law...the brotherhood of man. To some, baseball looked like a new national religion all its own."