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Baseball Myths, Masters, and Magic
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14862 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1988 |
3,556 Words |
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Jim Brosnan
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THE BASEBALL HALL OF FAME 50TH ANNIVERSARY BOOK
The National Baseball Hall of Fame
Museum and Library, Inc., and Gerald Astor
New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1988
352 pp., $40
Leo Tolstoy once said, "History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names."
Tolstoy was a first-class curmudgeon who apparently never read a history he didn't disdain. His pique was not unique, for many readers--some 98 percent of high school students--find history to be boring, at times enlightening, but seldom entertaining.
Thanks to Prentice-Hall Press, we now have a history book that defies Tolstoy's dictum: The Baseball Hall of Fame 50th Anniversary Book. It was authored, it appears by committee: Gerals Astor and the National Baseball Hall of Frame Museum and Library, Inc. it is the definitive history of professional baseball in America, a publishing event to be welcomed by the 100 million fans of the national pastime.
Crammed with all the facts any baseball trivia expert needs to win a barroom bet, The Baseball Hall of Fame 50th Anniversary Book (hereafter to be referred to as Hall of Fame) is also filled with anecdotal and biographical material that is engagingly written. It has over 250 illustrations, a sixteen-page full-color insert, and, to top things off, nine original essays by distinguished sportswriters. All that is missing, as far as a baseball fan is concerned, is a free pass to the Hall of Fame itself, which is located in Cooperstown, New York.
Cooperstown! It is a charming village with a population (2,300) not much bigger today than it was in 1839 when, according to myth, Abner Doubleday invented baseball. Doubleday was a Civil War general, a decorated hero, who himself never laid claim to the creation of baseball. But one of his schoolmates, Abner Graves, said he was there when the nineteen-year-old Doubleday laid out a playing field in the shape of a diamond, with three bases and a home plate. Moreover, said Graves, Doubleday declared that there should be two teams of nine players each, and that they should play nine innings, alternating turns at bat. An inning, then as now, was over when the team at bat made three outs.
Graves was in his eighties when he told this story in 1905 to the Mills Commission, an investigative group determined to prove that baseball was a native American game. In fact, a game very similar to baseball, called rounders, had been played in England during the eighteenth century, as historians even then pointed out.
The Doubleday myth persisted, however, mostly because the panjandrums of big league baseball insisted. When it was pointed out that Doubleday had been a first-year cadet at West Point in 1839, that the academy did not grant leave to cadets until their second year, and that therefore Doubleday couldn't have been in Cooperstown in the summer of 1839, the baseball officials and their sycophantic sportswriters, preferring the myth to the facts, simply revised history to suit themselves. Tolstoy would have
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