The Mills Commission Declares Abner Doubleday Invented Baseball

On December 30, 1907, the Mills Commission issued its final report declaring that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. The conclusion was almost entirely wrong, but it proved remarkably durable. Cooperstown became the home of the Hall of Fame, and the Doubleday myth endured for generations.

The commission had been organized in 1905 by Albert Spalding, the sporting goods magnate and former pitcher, to settle a long-running debate about whether baseball was an American invention or a descendant of the English game of rounders. Spalding wanted an American origin story, and the commission, chaired by Abraham G. Mills, a former National League president, delivered one.

The key evidence came from a single source, a 71-year-old Colorado mining engineer named Abner Graves, who claimed to have witnessed Doubleday laying out a diamond and explaining the rules in a Cooperstown cow pasture. The commission didn't interview Graves in person or corroborate his account. They didn't address the fact that Doubleday was enrolled at West Point in 1839 and could not have been in Cooperstown that summer. Doubleday himself, a Civil War general who died in 1893, left behind extensive papers that never mentioned baseball.

Graves was later committed to an institution for the criminally insane after murdering his wife. His testimony would not have survived scrutiny in any rigorous investigation.

Historians have since established that baseball evolved gradually from various bat-and-ball games played in England and America, with no single inventor and no founding moment. But the Doubleday myth gave the sport a creation story, and Cooperstown got a Hall of Fame. The fiction outlasted the facts.