Editing Abner Doubleday (section)

==Baseball==
{{Main|Doubleday myth}}

Although Doubleday achieved minor fame as a competent combat general with experience in many important Civil War battles, he is more widely known as the supposed inventor of the game of baseball, in [[Elihu Phinney]]'s cow pasture in [[Cooperstown, New York]], in 1839.

The [[Mills Commission]], chaired by [[Abraham G. Mills]], the fourth president of the [[National League (baseball)|National League]], was appointed in 1905 to determine the origin of baseball. The committee's final report, on December 30, 1907, stated, in part, that "the first scheme for playing baseball, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839." It concluded by saying, "in the years to come, in the view of the hundreds of thousands of people who are devoted to baseball, and the millions who will be, Abner Doubleday's fame will rest evenly, if not quite as much, upon the fact that he was its inventor ... as upon his brilliant and distinguished career as an officer in the Federal Army."<ref>Kirsch, p. xiii.</ref>

However, there is considerable evidence to dispute this claim. Baseball historian George B. Kirsch has described the results of the Mills Commission as a "myth". He wrote, "Robert Henderson, Harold Seymour, and other scholars have since debunked the Doubleday-Cooperstown myth, which nonetheless remains powerful in the American imagination because of the efforts of Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown." At his death, Doubleday left many letters and papers, none of which describe baseball or give any suggestion that he considered himself a prominent person in the evolution of the game, and his ''New York Times'' obituary did not mention the game at all.<ref name= nytobit>{{cite news|title=Obituary – Gen. Abner Doubleday|work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1893/01/28/archives/obituary-gen-abner-double-day.html|date=January 28, 1893|page=2|access-date=October 4, 2021}}</ref> Chairman Mills himself, who had been a Civil War colleague of Doubleday and a member of the honor guard for Doubleday's body as it lay in state in New York City, never recalled hearing Doubleday describe his role as the inventor. Doubleday was a cadet at West Point in the year of the alleged invention and his family had moved away from Cooperstown the prior year. Furthermore, the primary testimony to the commission that connected baseball to Doubleday was that of Abner Graves, whose credibility is questionable; a few years later, he shot his wife to death and was committed to an institution for the criminally insane for the rest of his life.<ref name="Kirschxiiixiv">Kirsch, pp. xiii–xiv.</ref> Part of the confusion could stem from there being another man by the same name in Cooperstown in 1839.<ref>Morris, Peter. ''But Didn't We Have Fun''. Ivan R. Dee Publishing. 2008</ref>

Despite the lack of solid evidence linking Doubleday to the origins of baseball, Cooperstown, New York, became the new home of what is today the [[National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum]] in 1937.

There may have been some relationship to baseball as a national sport and Abner Doubleday. While the modern rules of baseball were formulated in New York during the 1840s, it was the scattering of New Yorkers exposed to these rules throughout the country, that spread not only baseball, but also the "New York Rules", thereby harmonizing the rules, and being a catalyst for its growth. Doubleday was a high-ranking officer, whose duties included seeing to provisions for the US Army fighting throughout the south and border states. For the morale of the men, he is said to have provisioned balls and bats for the men.<ref>"Bats, Balls, and Bullets". Essay by George B. Kirsch ''Civil War Times Illustrated''. May 1998, pp. 30-37</ref>