Baseball’s history is as interesting and fascinating as the game itself with a lot of politics surrounding a game that has been around for almost 200 years. It is unclear as to who really invented baseball, but there are two main claimants for that post, Alexander Cartwright and Abner Doubleday.
Abner Doubleday
In the year 1905, Albert Spalding, who himself had been a star pitcher and was the creator of the Spalding Sporting Good Company created a commission comprising of US senators and former baseball executives to find out who really invented baseball. The Mills Commission completed its investigations in 3 years and finally published a report which claimed that Abner Doubleday had invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839.
However, these claims were considered false and many people refuted the findings of the commission saying that Spalding, who hailed from Cooperstown, was desperate to gain the honor for his hometown. His critics claim that Abner Doubleday had never played a baseball game, wasn’t even a resident of Cooperstown and never claimed to have invented the game.
Alexander Cartwright
The truth about the matter is quite simple. Alexander Cartwright used to play rounders (the forerunner of baseball) during the 1840s for the New York Knickerbockers. However, there were no set rules which could be implemented for inter club games. A committee of members from the club along with Cartwright published a set of rules in 1845 which were used for the first time on 19 June 1846 in a game between the Knickerbockers and their rivals, the New York Nines. This is how the game of baseball with rules was invented.
