Doubleday Doubletake

One Ball, Three Strikes, One Man Out For a century or more, Abner Doubleday was credited with inventing the modern game of baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. His name is on historical markers, playing fields, and for a time, even a professional baseball team. The Hall of Fame opened in Cooperstown on the hundredth anniversary of his invention. Grandson of Revolutionary War heroes and son of a congressman, Doubleday was a West Point graduate and a military hero in his own right. He was the kind of man who should have invented baseball. And the idyllic Village of Cooperstown was the kind of place it should have been invented. More recently, however, baseball historians have discounted Doubleday's role altogether. Some have gone so far as to speculate that, being long dead when the myth was created around 1905, Doubleday was a convenient foil for a conspiracy led by Albert Spalding, an adherent of Theosophy, a prominent philosophical and religious movement of the day, to set in stone the Am