SOME TWO hundred and fifty thousand people a year come to the little village of Cooperstown, in upstate New York, to visit the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame. They are drawn by the large, brick museum on Cooperstown’s Main Street, and many still cherish the belief that this is the place where baseball began; here it was invented and first played. The inventor is supposed to be the Civil War general Abner Doubleday; he is supposed to have thought up the game in 1839.This is a doublebarreled historical falsehood. Coopers town is not the birthplace of baseball, and Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with the invention of baseball.
Cooperstown, a community of twenty-four hundred people, was founded in 1787 by William Cooper, father of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and some of the local scenes figure in the Leatherstocking Tales. But how did Cooperstown and Doubleday get tangled up with the national pastime?
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