Popular legend, repeated in textbooks until very recently, has it that the game of baseball sprang, Athena-like, from Abner Doubleday’s thoughtful brow somewhere in the vicinity of Cooperstown, New York, in the spring of 1839. Doubleday (1819–1893) was a man of many accomplishments, to be sure: a capable Union officer, he fought in several major Civil War battles, including Second Manassas and Gettysburg; a capable capitalist, he founded the first cable-car company in San Francisco. But even Doubleday claimed credit, and then quietly, only for codifying and regularizing the rules of a game that had been developing over the course of several centuries, born of a colonial New England game called “town ball” that in turn descended from the English field game called “rounders,” an ancestor of not only baseball but also cricket, a game played enthusiastically in every former English colony save the United States. Albert Spalding (1850–1915), a pitcher, manager, and entrepreneur who founded the sporting-equipment company that still bears his name, acknowledged that English descent in his book America’s National Game (1911), though grudgingly, for it was he who gave Doubleday so much credit to begin with. Having allowed its similarities to cricket, however, Spalding was quick to point out that baseball distinguished our national qualities from those of our former rulers: the English “play Cricket because it accords with the traditions of their country to do so; because it is easy and does not overtax their energy or their thought,” whereas, Spalding continued, “Base Ball owes its prestige as our National Game to the fact that as no other form of sport it is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, and Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistence, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim, Vigor, Virility.”
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