The Mills Commission, a panel appointed by Albert Goodwill Spalding, announces that the game of baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday, a respected Civil War general. Spalding, a former big league player, manager, owner, and the creator of a sporting goods company that bears his name, launched the committee to investigate baseball's origins. His intention was to prove that baseball had been devised in America, and not through the evolution of British activities such as townball, rounders, and cricket.
There was no evidence to back up his claim. Then, a couple years later, a 73 year-old man named Abner Graves wrote the commission a letter. In it, he claimed to have been a companion of Doubleday, who allegedly drew out the rules of baseball in the dirt, on a small farm owned by Elihu Phinney in Cooperstown, on a June day in 1839. Without checking for proof, Spalding used the old man's letter to confirm his assertions. And thus, Abner Doubleday was thereby recognized as the inventor of baseball.
But years of dedicated research by historians would disprove Spalding's efforts as a massive hoax. Doubleday never wrote a single letter about or mentioned to be in involved with the game of baseball, and the day that he supposedly created it, he was stationed in West Point, not Cooperstown. The man who wrote the letter turned out to be crazy, and was later sent to an asylum for killing his wife -- the Doubleday story was a complete fabrication.
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