MLB | The Museum Built on a Fabrication (Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown)

The Baseball Hall of Fame stands in Cooperstown because of a letter written by a mining engineer who was five years old at the time of the events he described.

In 1905 the sporting-goods magnate Albert Spalding convened a commission, chaired by former National League president Abraham Mills, to establish that baseball was American and not a descendant of the English game rounders. A newspaper appeal for recollections produced a reply from Abner Graves of Akron, Ohio, who said he had watched Abner Doubleday sketch a diamond in the dirt at Cooperstown in 1839.

Nobody on the commission ever interviewed Graves, checked that Doubleday was enrolled at West Point in 1839 rather than living in Cooperstown, or noticed that Graves had been a small child at the time. Nor does anyone appear to have wondered why Doubleday, who fired the first Union shot at Fort Sumter, fought at Gettysburg and left extensive diaries, never once mentioned baseball in any of them. The commission reported on 30 December 1907 that the first scheme for playing baseball had been devised by Doubleday at Cooperstown in 1839, and did not name Graves as its source. Graves later killed his wife and died in an asylum.

In 1934 an old ball was found in a farmhouse attic at Fly Creek, three miles away. Stephen C. Clark, a Cooperstown philanthropist from the Singer sewing-machine family, bought it for five dollars, called it the Doubleday baseball, and put it in a one-room display. It drew visitors. Clark asked National League president Ford Frick whether the game would support a hall of fame in the village, and Frick agreed. The first class was elected in 1936: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson.

The museum opened on 12 June 1939, timed to the supposed centenary of an invention that never happened. A plaque honouring Doubleday had been installed before the doors opened. He is not, and has never been, a member of the Hall of Fame.

The origin story is now rejected by every serious historian, including Major League Baseball's own, and the Hall does not defend it. What the building holds is real: the Giamatti Research Center keeps something over three million documents, a quarter of a million photographs, and a file on every man who has played in the majors.

So the address is an accident of a fabrication, and the institution at that address is the most rigorous archive the sport has. Both things are true and it is worth holding them together.

Coordinates are the museum at 25 Main Street, from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, photographed by Kenneth C. Zirkel, 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the museum in 2012, photographed by Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.