, a neighborhood boy, sketch a diamond in the dirt with a stick and organized the other schoolboys to play a new game, which he called "baseball." Spalding reportedly created a diamond-shaped field because runners could maintain momentum when rounding the bases, as opposed to the stop-and-go running in a square field.
Graves' testimony was convincing enough for the Mills Commission. Three years later in 1907, the commission announced that: (1) baseball had its origins in the United States; and (2) the first scheme for playing the game was devised by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. In short, baseball was "our game."
Contemporary baseball historians have cast new doubts on whether Abner Doubleday is indeed the father of the game. Robert Henderson, for example, discovered several books and pamphlets published before 1839 which have diamond field diagrams with rules and instructions on how to play a game called "Base Ball." Henderson further noted that if Doubleday were the inventor of baseball, Doubleday was not aware
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