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Albert Goodwill Spalding and the Mythic Origins of Baseball

© Meg Greene Malvasi

Born near Byron, Illinois in 1850, Albert Goodwill Spalding played professional baseball in Boston and Chicago during the 1870s. When he retired in 1876, he and his brother, James, opened a sporting goods business in Chicopee, Massachusetts. At the same time, Spalding remained active in professional baseball, acting successively as manager, secretary, and president of the Chicago White Stockings between 1882 and 1891. But it was in the creation an enduring piece of baseball lore that Spalding made what was at once his greatest and his most dubious contribution to the game.

In his day, no one did more than Spalding to promote the connections between the game of baseball and the virtues of American life--virtues such as character, team work, consistency, determination, perseverance, and the will to win. In Spalding's words baseball promoted "American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity [wisdom] , Success; American Vim, Vigor, Virility." If baseball truly had a special contribution to make to shaping and maintaining the American character, however, then Spalding believed the origins of baseball had also to be indisputably American.

As a young man, Spalding had accepted the argument of celebrated sportswriter Henry Chadwick that baseball derived from the English games of rounders. By 1905, however, Spalding had convinced himself that baseball was so completely representative of American values that it could have had its beginnings nowhere but in the United States. To discredit Chadwick's findings, Spalding asserted, without having one shred of evidence, that baseball evolved from a colonial game known as One Old Cat, the playing of which he failed to describe in detail. In an effort to prove his claim, Spalding formed a commission of baseball experts charged with investigating and establishing the definitive origins of baseball.

Between 1905 and 1907, several thousand pages of testimony flooded the offices of James E. Sullivan, who served as secretary of Spalding's commission. In the issue of The Sporting News dated December 2, 1905, the editors argued that much of the data the commission had gathered and examined was pure fabrication. The one piece of apparently irrefutable evidence demonstrating that baseball was an American game actually came from Spalding himself. Writing to the commission in July 1907, Spalding called attention to a letter from Abner Graves, a mining engineer in Denver, Colorado, who claimed "that the present game of Baseball was designed and named by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York in 1839."

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