Desperately trying to get some kind of understanding of baseball, David Whitley heads to Boston’s Fenway Park and Cooperstown, where the game was supposedly invented.
Hunched over the bar, faintly jet-lagged, the statistics blizzard fired past. I had, I quickly realised, no idea what any of it meant. I don’t know how a baseball batting average is calculated, or what number would be considered a good one. I don’t understand walking, relief pitching or why some games seem to last three times as long as others.
Baseball, to me, has always been glorified rounders. It’s a sport for schools that can’t afford proper cricket equipment. But Americans don’t tend to like being told that they’re getting obsessive over rounders.
A Fenway Park tour in Boston
It was time to try and get it. And that meant a trip to the most revered stadium in baseball. Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox, celebrated its 100th birthday last year. As you quickly discover when you go for a tour of the stadium, it exists in a timewarp. The shabby interiors, the old wooden seats, even the fonts seem stuck in a distant past.
It’s like seeing an old temple ruin with no idea about its historical significance, or the faintest idea what any of the inscriptions and carvings mean.
The Fenway Park tour is reasonably good fun, full of stories of fans and players. One seat is red because that’s where the longest home run hit at the ground landed, and the numbers on the stand are the ones that have been retired in order of the greats of the game that wore those shirts.
But I didn’t leave with any love for the game or the Red Sox, just the knowledge that if I was to watch a game, I’d prefer it to be somewhere like Fenway Park rather than a modern, purpose built stadium named after a company that sells paper clips and Post-It notes.
The origins of baseball in Cooperstown, New York
To dig further, I’d have to go further west to where the game began. Cooperstown is a gorgeous lakeside village in upstate New York. It’s home of batting cages and, more importantly, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. This is supposedly where war veteran Abner Doubleday invented the game back in 1839.
As a museum, it’s really good. There’s a sense of heart and storytelling missing from other such museums (hello the tedious Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts). There are particularly good exhibitions on baseball legend Babe Ruth and the resistance to integrating black players into the game following the Second World War.
The dubious story of Abner Doubleday
It does a great job of conveying the legacies, rivalries and dynasties of the sport – and, most importantly, makes you care. But the most intriguing story of all comes right at the beginning. And it’s the tale of Abner Doubleday.
In 1903, sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding set up a commission to discover where baseball was invented. The people on the commission – baseball types rather than historians – studied the evidence for three years, before deciding a letter sent by former Cooperstown resident Abner Graves was the most appealing explanation. Graves said Doubleday invented the game, with little evidence to back it up, and the commission went with it.
An all-American sport?
From Spalding’s perspective, proving that it was an American invention was very handy for promoting the sport and his business. And who better to have invented the all-American game than a decorated civil war general and West Point academy graduate?
So Spalding and a few other cronies with vested interests set about propagating the almost certainly nonsensical myth. Baseball effectively invented Abner Doubleday, rather than the other way round. And Cooperstown became the home of baseball.
Abner Graves, incidentally, would have been four years old when Doubleday left Cooperstown. He also died in an asylum for the insane after murdering his wife.
Similar games to baseball around the world?
So who did invent it then? Well pictures in the museum show similar games being played in ancient Egypt and medieval Spain. Baseball almost certainly evolved from a number of bat and ball games. And the game it is most likely to have evolved from? Well, one early set of published rules were a direct copy of a certain game played in England…
It’s also interesting to note that Spalding set up the commission to find a convenient story following a row with respected sports journalist Henry Chadwick. Chadwick, of course, said baseball almost certainly evolved from… You guessed it – rounders.
