Irish immigrants, mostly. At the same time there was considerable — and quite accurate — sentiment that baseball had evolved from the English game rounders, which is primarily played by school-aged children.
Then, as now, there was a large segment of the population who simply could not tolerate the idea that something they considered truly American to be tainted by the influence of [shudder] foreigners, so they did what people who think that way do, then as now: they simply lied about it.
The first widely-accepted lie about baseball being a truly American sport revolved around Alexander Cartwright, who helped found and led the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in New York and who, in , was credited with writing down the first rules of baseball.
Cartwright was certainly a baseball pioneer, but what he and his club were doing was not novel and did not come from some single, American-born game. Many people involved with baseball would cite Cartwright as its inventor, but the notion that it truly evolved from rounders and some other bat-and-ball games from the British Isles continued to hold currency. Especially after prominent sportswriter Henry Chadwick — a native of England — cited rounders as the progenitor of baseball.
For ideological reasons they truly wanted — truly needed — baseball to be an American game. No rounders! The dispute would continue to boil for some time. In Spalding called for an official investigation into how the sport was invented and he totally rigged the investigation in his own favor.
In , sixteen years after Doubleday's death, a special commission created by the sporting goods magnate and former major league player A. Spalding was set up to determine baseball's origins—namely if it was invented in the United States or derived from games in the United Kingdom. The commission used flimsy evidence—the claims of one man, mining engineer Abner Graves, who said he went to school with Doubleday—to come up with the origin story, which managed to stick.
As it turns out, the real history of baseball is a little more complicated than the Doubleday legend. References to games resembling baseball in the United States date back to the 18th century. By the time of the American Revolution , variations of such games were being played on schoolyards and college campuses across the country. The winner of the competition among 19th-century bat-and-ball games was the so-called New York game, with its system of three outs and a foul territory.
The sport also served as a quasi-political movement. Many baseball pioneers had connections to movements like abolitionism, temperance and labor unions. By the s, amateur baseball was entertaining enough to attract spectators, many of them gamblers. Once you could sell tickets, you could pay players; and the moment money entered the picture, so did scheming owners and greedy players. Professional baseball in the United States is now a legal monopoly sold as commodified entertainment to the masses, but it has never been pure.
Why not head to the park and make up new games? Play with three bases or get rid of the shortstop, and see what happens. We could still love Major League Baseball. The establishment of baseball as the national pastime began when, in the second half of the 19th century, baseball missionaries mostly from New York spread across a booming land along new railroads and canals. John W. We have recently relaunched the commenting experience at America and are aiming for a more focused commenting experience with better moderation by opening comments on a select number of articles each day.
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