Aspects of Baseball

Baseball begins at the end of the nineteenth century, purportedly through the efforts of a man named Abner Doubleday, a West Point graduate, a Civil War general, and later a contributor to newspapers and magazines. Doubleday never mentioned baseball in the articles he wrote and never claimed to have invented the

game. Baseball is also not mentioned in any of his 67 diaries. His obituary in the New York Times does not mention baseball:

It may be that he was an extraordinarily modest man who did not choose to take credit for his great invention, but as far as anyone has yet been able to discover, his name was never in any way associated with baseball during his lifetime, and it seems reasonable to conclude that Abner Doubleday went to his grave in 1893 without any idea that his name would forever be linked with the invention of baseball (Zoss and Bowman 41).

The association of Doubleday's name with baseball was not yet made in 1893 when a banquet was held at Delmonico's in New York City to celebrate the retur

. . .
sent when Doubleday first outlined with a stick in the dirt the present diamond-shaped Base Ball field" (Zoss and Bowman 43), an event said to take place in 1839. There is no evidence that such an event took place and considerable evidence that it did not. Other things that Graves did say suggest that rounders was indeed the origin of baseball, such as the fact that in Doubleday's version there were eleven men on a side (as in rounders) and that anyone getting the ball could put a man out by hitting him between bases (also a rule in rounders). Many have challenged the legend, such as Robert W. Henderson, who published a refutation of the Doubleday story in 1937 (Zoss and Bowman 43-44). Baseball took off as a national game in the 1850s, in part as a recreational activity for factory workers. Industrial managers of the time did not change their system of working for the benefit of workers but instead tried to direct the leisure time of those workers into approved channels outside of the workplace or in connection with it. Baseball was one of the ways of doing this. In the decades before 1900, baseball play among workers changed from self-generated play to company-sponsored semi-pro teams, and factory or neighborhood might the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Progressive Era, Zoss Bowman, Civil War, American Pastime, Ball Club, Ball Guide, Chicago Seymour, AG Mills, York Times, Abner Doubleday, zoss bowman, base ball, abner doubleday, white 7 baseball, baseball developed, game baseball, progressive ethos, baseball national, civil war, 7 baseball, white 7,
Approximate Word count = 1221
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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