Historical Spaghetti: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Abner Doubleday was a renowned Civil War general for the Union, yet a half century after the end of the bloodiest American military conflict in history, his name became synonymous with baseball for reasons that are difficult to discern in the twenty-first century. Known mostly for firing the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter and for his role at Gettysburg, the West Point graduate achieved his greatest fame 12 years after his death when a group of sporting men got together in 1905 and decided to credit Doubleday with the invention of baseball—America’s pastime. The Mills Commission (1905-1908) report cited Doubleday’s creation of the game in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839 as the origin of the United States’ favorite sport in the early twentieth century. source: National Baseball Hall of Fame In reality, a combination of several factors—his minor-hero status from the war, his family’s proximity to Cooperstown in his youth, and his overall “American” persona/lifestyle as re...