Page "Abner Doubleday" Paragraph 25

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.

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.

Part of the confusion could stem from there being another man by the same name in Cooperstown in 1839.