Baseball's official inventor was at West Point that year

On December 30, 1907, a commission of baseball men issued its finding on where the game came from. According to "the best evidence obtainable to date," its report said, baseball had been devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. Doubleday had been a Union general in the Civil War. He had died in 1893.

The commission was there to settle an argument. In 1903 the baseball writer Henry Chadwick had published an article tracing baseball back to the English game of rounders. Albert Spalding, a former star pitcher who had become the country's leading sporting goods businessman, believed baseball was an American invention. He challenged Chadwick to let a commission decide, and in 1905 one was formed under Abraham Mills, a former president of the National League.

Its members were baseball figures, not historians. Two of them were in effect Spalding's employees, because he had secretly bought their sporting goods businesses. The commission put out notices asking anyone who knew how baseball began to come forward.

The answer it used came in one letter, from Abner Graves, a 71-year-old mining engineer in Denver. Graves wrote that as a boy in Cooperstown he had seen Doubleday improve a local game called town ball and name it base ball. In 1839 Graves had been five. The commission did not check his story. Its report went further than the letter, crediting Doubleday with the name, the diamond, the fielders' positions and the rules. Graves had mentioned none of those.

In 1839 Doubleday was a cadet at West Point, where he had enrolled the year before, and there is no record of him taking leave. He left many letters and papers when he died, and none of them describe baseball. His obituary in The New York Times did not mention the game. Mills had been his friend and stood in the honor guard when his body lay in state, and he never heard Doubleday describe himself as the inventor.

A game called base ball had been played in America long before 1839. The earliest known mention is in the diary of a Princeton student in 1786, who wrote that he played "baste ball" on the campus and lost.

The report stood as the accepted answer for more than half a century. In the 1930s Stephen Clark, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, wanted to bring tourists back to Cooperstown, his home town. The Depression had cut its tourist trade, and Prohibition had ruined the local hop farms. He built the National Baseball Hall of Fame there, and the Doubleday story was a large part of why it went to Cooperstown and how it was first promoted. It opened on June 12, 1939, a hundred years after the date in the report.

The ballpark two blocks from the Hall stands on the old pasture where he was supposed to have invented the game. It is named Doubleday Field.