Authors: George Vecsey
Of course, brotherhood went only so far. Blacks who had been freed from slavery and others who had fought for the Union in the Civil War soon excelled at the game. In 1867, an all-black team, the Philadelphia Excelsiors, beat the Brooklyn Uniques, 42–25. That
same year, the National Association of Base Ball Players refused to accept black teams. In 1869, the Philadelphia Pythians, also black, completed their second undefeated season. In 1871, Octavius Catto, the manager of the Pythians, was killed in a race riot.
Some blacks had the courage to persist. John W. (Bud) Fowler joined a white professional team in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1872, but so many opponents slid into him with their rudimentary spikes that he had to protect himself by taping wooden slats on his legs, perhaps the first recorded use of shin guards. Ultimately, Fowler settled on an all-black touring team named the Page Fence Giants, based in Adrian, Michigan, and barnstorming around the eastern third of the country in their own private railroad car, sometimes playing (and beating) squads of major-leaguers.
Moses Fleetwood Walker, the son of an Ohio doctor and a graduate of Oberlin College and law student, became the first known black major-leaguer in 1884, when he joined the Toledo team of the American Association, followed by his brother, Welday. Some of his teammates accepted Walker, but opposition came from Cap Anson, the star and manager of the Chicago White Stockings, run by none other than Albert Goodwill Spalding. Anson's views were well known. A team in Newark, New Jersey, once fielded a black Canadian pitcher named George Stovey, until Anson shouted, “Get that nigger off the field!” In 1884, after Anson refused to let his team play against the Walkers, the Toledo team began receiving threatening letters, and dropped both men. Walker played for other teams, but he ultimately left the game and led a stormy life that included an acquittal for murder after he had stabbed a man in self-defense. Although more than fifty blacks had played in this period, official baseball was soon completely white.
Spalding, who claimed baseball “elevates and… fits the American character,” sat back while the Walkers were run out of the business. There would not be another recognized African-American player in the so-called major leagues until 1947. By that time, both Spalding and Anson would be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, a totally bogus setting that Spalding would help to invent.
F
or the past century, Abner Doubleday has been generally accepted as the father of baseball, but only now does the sport officially acknowledge that Doubleday is a twentieth-century invention, a red herring, the man who wasn't there. Doubleday existed, there is no doubt about that. He was a West Point graduate who went on to become a Civil War general with considerable public visibility, but he is also a classic example of the American need to construct our own mythology.
Doubleday never claimed to have invented baseball. Others gave him credit for this, long after he was gone and he suited their purpose. In the late nineteenth century, Americans were still trying to distance themselves from their European origins, having fled across the ocean, seeking religious and political freedom or just enough to eat. There was still enough insecurity over domination by London and Paris that Americans felt the need for their own heroes, their own pioneers, their own artists and writers, their own traditions.
Doubleday is hardly the first or last example of the national need to fib: Was Columbus really the first European to explore North America? Did George Washington really chop down a cherry tree and admit his guilt? Mythmaking always needs new material, including the supposed capture of a soldier, Jessica Lynch, in Iraq or the death of the football player–soldier Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.
The creation of Doubleday as legendary father of the game stemmed from the ideological dispute between Albert Goodwill Spalding and Henry Chadwick. Historians do not know whether Spalding consciously invented Doubleday's role, or whether he slipped into the belief through wishful thinking. In the end, the result was the same.
The scientist and baseball expert Stephen Jay Gould called the Doubleday legend “baseball's creation myth,” referring to one
side's discovery of scientific evidence of primates straightening up and performing increasingly sophisticated tasks of body and mind over the millennia and the other side's finding that such evidence does not fit their creed.
The collision between Spalding's and Chadwick's visions became apparent at the turn of the century. Spalding wrote a letter to Tim Murnane, a former player who had become a sportswriter in Boston: “Our good old American game of base ball must have an American Dad.” In 1903, Chadwick, as the editor of the
Spalding Guide
, wrote that baseball had directly descended from the old British game of rounders. Having been born in England, Chadwick eagerly accepted baseball as the quintessential American pastime but was merely pointing out its complicated roots leading back to England.
Spalding, like many turn-of-the-century Americans, was vigorously aware of the growing power and size of the young country. Two years later, the
Spalding Guide
carried bravado from A.G. himself: “I hereby challenge the Grand Old Man of Base Ball to produce his proofs and demonstrate in some tangible way, if he can, that our national game derived its origin from Rounders.” Of course there was proof, although it was not as easily attainable as it would become a century later, when the most rudimentary search of the Internet can come up with copious legitimate lists of ancient bat-and-ball references.
Spalding seemed to need the big-bang theory of baseball to justify his patriotism. In 1906 he appointed Abraham G. Mills, the former president of the National League and a vice president of the Otis Elevator Co., to lead a national board to investigate baseball's roots. This was the very same Mills who had hammered home the American origins of baseball during that nine-course banquet at Delmonico's in 1889, leading to grown men pounding on the table and chanting: “No rounders! No rounders! No rounders!” Mills was now back for a second tour of duty in the table-pounding department.
The seven members of the Mills committee were all reputable but none was a scholar or a researcher, nor did they have a staff to perform even basic tasks of culling information. As unheard of as
this may be in contemporary America, their sole job seemed to be justifying a set belief.
In 1907, Spalding came up with two letters from Abner Graves, a mining engineer in Colorado, who was originally from the village of Cooperstown in upstate New York. Graves recalled Abner Doubleday stopping a marbles game in front of a tailor shop to teach baseball to the youths of Cooperstown—“Abner Doubleday being then a boy pupil of ‘Green's Select School,’” Graves added. At times, Graves was vague about the exact year of Doubleday's “invention,” but ultimately he settled on 1839, when he would have been five and Doubleday would have been twenty.
Doubleday was born on June 26, 1819, in Ballston Spa, approximately seventy-five miles from Cooperstown, and grew up in Auburn, far west of that area. His father, Ulysses, had been baptized in Cooperstown, but there is no specific evidence of Abner's ever setting foot in the town. He entered West Point on September 1, 1838, and in 1839 he would surely have been court-martialed had he been discovered nearly 100 miles away from the academy, playing a ball game. There is no record of him leaving the academy during that time, nor is there any trace of his involvement with baseball.
“You ask for some information as to how I passed my youth,” Doubleday once responded to a letter from a citizen, late in his military career. “I was brought up in a book store and early imbibed a taste for reading. I was fond of poetry and much interested in mathematical studies. In my outdoor sports, I was addicted to topographical work and even as a boy amused myself by making maps of the country around my father's residence, which was in Auburn, N.Y.”
Doubleday was commissioned from the Military Academy in 1842 and served in Monterrey, Mexico. On April 12, 1861, he fired the first shot at rebel troops menacing Fort Sumter, and later he served at Bull Run and Antietam with a minor role at Gettysburg, helping to repel Pickett's fatal charge.
Baseball had grown popular among both the blue and gray soldiers of the time, but in Doubleday's entire life there is only one
single link with the sport: in 1871, when he was finishing his career in charge of an all-black regiment at Fort McKavett, Texas, he requested baseball equipment for his troops, for recreation.
Doubleday retired from the military in 1873 and used his scientific skills to help build the first cable car railway in San Francisco. He died at the age of seventy-four on January 26, 1893, in Mend-ham, New Jersey, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. A decade after his death, Doubleday was advanced as the father of a game he apparently had never played or discussed.
Ulysses Doubleday's older brother, Demas, did live in Springfield, just to the north of Cooperstown, and in 1829 he had a son, Abner Demas Doubleday, who lived around Cooperstown until after the Civil War. In his addled later years, Graves could have confused Abner Demas Doubleday with the future general, despite the ten-year gap in their ages.
Mills's connection is complicated, in that he had been a friend of Doubleday and had served in the honor guard when Doubleday's body lay in state in New York's City Hall. The findings by the Mills commission were published in Spalding's next baseball guide in March of 1908, but were signed by only one person—Mills himself. The league presidents verified the findings but Chadwick died that spring without responding to the official linking of Doubleday and baseball.
In June of 1924, Graves, then ninety, shot and killed his second wife, Minnie, in a dispute over the sale of their house. He died in a state asylum for the criminally insane in Pueblo, Colorado, in the fall of 1926. His troubled old age would seem to cast doubts on his flickering memories of a childhood experience in Cooperstown— but he was Spalding's star witness, his only witness, and he served a purpose. With its relatively short history, the United States was quite well served by the prospect that a prominent general had dreamed up the game in one of the thirteen original states, that the sport was a purely American invention.
Spalding's mischief went a long way. In 1935, a distant relative of Abner Graves found a scruffy and tattered baseball in a farmhouse in Fly Creek, just outside Cooperstown. The so-called Fly Creek
Ball somehow wound up being accepted as the talisman and proof of Doubleday's involvement with the game. The absolute lack of proof would not reach critical mass for many decades. In the meantime, lucky old baseball was about to gain a core, a home, a central place where everybody could celebrate the American game. The Hall would become the most popular sports museum in the country, and Albert Spalding would remain a hallowed figure, despite his strange involvement in the Doubleday myth.
The old pitcher became a wealthy man through his sporting goods empire, which included
Spalding's Official Baseball Guide
, first published in 1876, plus the manufacture of uniforms, bats, balls, croquet equipment, ice skates, fishing gear, tennis racquets, dumbbells, shoes, caps, hunting goods, and bicycles.
The Spalding name survives in the memory of generations of city children who played ball games (punchball, stickball, stoopball) with the lively pink ball manufactured by the Spalding company. Lifetime reputations were made by neighborhood heroes who could hit a pink ball the distance of three sewer manholes, or punch a pink ball off the brick wall of a grade school. In New York, when I grew up, any bouncy pink ball was called a spaldeen.
—
Like generations of Americans, old A.G. left Chicago and moved to a warmer clime—Point Loma, California, where he ran for the Senate, and lost. His wife, Josie, died in 1899 but he soon married Elizabeth Mayer Churchill, with whom he already had a son, who was promptly renamed Albert Goodwill Spalding, Jr.
This second marriage, with its background of scandal, raises a connection between Spalding and Doubleday: the second Mrs. Spalding had become interested in Theosophy, a spiritual movement, and the old pitcher became president of the American Theosophical Society. In his later years, Doubleday had subscribed to the Transcendentalist journal the
Dial
and had attended spiritual gatherings in the White House with President and Mrs. Lincoln. At the very least, Spalding, in California, would have been aware of Doubleday through their mutual interest in Theosophy. Aside from Graves's two letters, it is unclear why Spalding settled on
Doubleday as the father of baseball. Was it a cynical act or wishful thinking? We may never know. Spalding died on September 9, 1915, at the age of sixty-five, his funeral held at the Theosophy center, known as the Temple of Aryans.
—
The sport lucked out with the setting of the Hall, in a charming corner of Americana. The burghers of Cooperstown disregarded any questions about the Doubleday myth, and opened the Hall in time for the alleged centennial year of 1939. Members of the Baseball Writers Association of America voted in 1936 for the first entering class, with Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson all receiving the necessary 75 percent. The next year, Tris Speaker was chosen, along with Napoleon Lajoie and Cy Young. In 1938, Grover Cleveland Alexander was chosen, and in 1939, George Sisler, Eddie Collins, and Wee Willie Keeler were picked, among others. The same year, Lou Gehrig, whose fatal illness had just been diagnosed, was quickly installed, as the Hall bypassed its rule that a player must have been retired for five years. Chadwick was chosen in 1938 as a builder of the game and Spalding followed in 1939.
The first induction ceremony was held on June 12, 1939, with many of the honorees in attendance, but not all. Back home, working as a greeter in a bar, Alexander was quoted as saying: “The Hall of Fame is fine, but it doesn't mean bread and butter. It's only your picture on the wall.”