There
used to be a rumor that baseball was invented by General Abner Doubleday. The story had it that he had seen games
played by his men in camp during the American Civil War and he went home and wrote the rules. This was not exactly true, but there was a
grain of truth within it. Unfortunately,
once that myth was busted, the narrative switched, as it often does in this
country, to the polar opposite view.
People began claiming that Doubleday had no part in the invention of
baseball, which is not true either.
Baseball
truly is an American sport which was developed by people across the
country. And just like those people, the
sources of its rules are all immigrants, and it is a melting pot of those
concepts. Men played games like
rounders, fletch catch, stick ball, cricket, and other games with a ball and a
stick. Bases could be in a square, a
triangle, a diamond, or whatever layout in which the trees happened to be. Rules often involved getting players around
all the bases back to the starting location, but how it was done varied widely.
New
Englanders, and especially New Yorkers, like to claim sole credit for creating
the sport, but this is as much a myth as the claim that Doubleday invented
it. They did create one of the games in
which baseball derived. They even called
it "base ball" written as two words, and it has a lot of familiar
rules. They even had leagues before the
Civil War. However, it was not until the
integration of other rules from other areas that the game truly began to take
shape to what we know today.
It
was during the Civil War, when soldiers from vast sections of the United
States came together in camps and interacted, that the game began to fully
form. The men wanted something to do to
while away the boredom in camp. Card
playing was a major pastime; but when they wanted to move, they needed a sport
that allowed them to stretch their legs.
The biggest obstacle was finding something they all knew whose rules
they could agree upon.
Unlike
today where we've all learned several games from television and in
interconnected schools, the men of the 19th century had all grown up in vastly
different cultures. But since they all
played different forms of this game with a bat, a ball, and bases, they had a
basis on which to start. Players from
the different regions would explain aspects of their own games, and they would
agree upon what they liked and what they didn't. They had to do what their governments had
been unable to do, compromise, to agree on the rules for everyone to play.
This
process happened in the North and South.
There were a few occasions when enemies played against each other during
sieges or long encampments when no fighting was happening. This constant exchange of ideas molded the
game into a more refined sport, and soldiers took it home with them when the
war ended.
One
of these soldiers was Abner Doubleday.
He had indeed spotted soldiers playing the game in camps, and he did
write about it, including some of the rules he liked, later on. He had a larger platform than a lot of
people, so his version of it spread a lot further. So he DID have an influence, but that is
hardly inventing the game.
The
truth is, baseball is the true American game, invented by America itself.
It's for this reason I became interested in writing about baseball within the Civil War in the form of my novel The American Game. In it, enemy soldiers play a series of baseball games together before they are forced to going back to killing one another. You can find it by clicking below:
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