Baseball

Sporting-goods magnate Albert Spalding, wanting to refute the theory that baseball derived from the English game rounders, called in 1905 for an investigation into the sport's origins. A commission chaired by Abraham G. Mills received a letter from mining engineer Abner Graves, who claimed to have watched Abner Doubleday sketch a baseball diamond and lay out rules in Cooperstown, New York. The commission's 1908 report named Doubleday the game's inventor and 1839 its invention year, and that account, not the documented one, is what this atlas treats as the debunked position for its origin-year fact. It does not survive scrutiny: Doubleday was a first-year cadet at West Point in 1839, where new cadets were rarely granted leave, making a trip to Cooperstown implausible; Graves was five years old in 1839 and later made other demonstrably false claims about his own life; and Doubleday, who died in 1893, mentioned baseball only once across his surviving letters and diaries, never as something he invented. The Knickerbocker Rules, codified by Alexander Cartwright in 1845 from rules developed by William R. Wheaton in 1837, remain the earliest secure documented codification, and evidence such as an 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts ordinance banning baseball near the meeting house shows the game already existed well before 1839 in any case.