I was sitting in a Tasty Freeze in Blakely, Ga., the site of my first church after moving home to South Georgia.
There on the counter of the ice cream stand was a “Grit” newspaper and its thought for the day was, “If ten thousand people say it’s so; that doesn’t’ make it so.”
When asked, “Who invented baseball?” most people would answer, “Abner Doubleday,” and most people would be wrong. Baseball was invented in England. It was first named and described in 1744 in “A Little Pretty Pocket Book” and that book was then reprinted in the United States in 1762.
So how in the world did Abner Doubleday get credit for inventing a game that had been around for nearly a hundred years? It seems that baseball’s executive board at the time, wanted to score a home run by claiming baseball had been invented in America, so they commissioned a report on the game’s origins in 1907.
In their report, baseball was the brainchild of Civil War general and hero Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839. There were two problems: Doubleday never mentioned inventing baseball nor had he ever visited Cooperstown.
And now I’m wondering about the origins of mom and apple pie ...
So, who should get credit for “inventing” baseball? Most authorities now agree that Alexander Cartwright, a Manhattan bookseller, should get the credit for inventing the modern game of baseball.
In 1842, he founded the Knickerbocker Baseball Club, named after the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company, for which he was a volunteer. Cartwright drew the first diagram of the diamondshaped field, and the rules of the modern game are based on bylaws his team created.
He was finally inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame 96 later in 1938.
All this, like many things, is a matter of perception.
Our church has been reading, and I’ve been preaching through the book of Hebrews where we’ve discovered the foundation of our faith is “the truth and nothing but the truth,” i.e., nothing but the facts!
A passage in Genesis says:
“… when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate!” — Genesis 3: 6
But the Bible stories add an imaginary apple, and so my simple prayer is, “Lord, help us to become a people of the truth, in Jesus’ name, amen!”
Charles “Buddy” Whatley is a retired United Methodist pastor serving Dawson Street Methodist Church in Thomasville, Ga. He and wife, Mary Ella, are missionaries to the Navajo.
