That is fact. Then things get fuzzy. My father took me to the Baseball Hall of Fame when I was a boy and stood with me while I stared up at the oil-portrait face of Abner Doubleday, the man called the creator of baseball, enshrined in Cooperstown, the place where the creator supposedly created. He was a perfectly American man, Doubleday, face worn with some sort of perseverance, mustache stiff and thick like firewood. He was a Civil War hero, a generously wealthy man, an avid believer in things like God and goodness. He was credited with the invention of baseball fifteen years after his death when a Colorado miner faked a memory, said that on a dirt patch in a little industrial river town he watched Doubleday draw the game’s parameters on the ground with a twig, said that they played it that same day, a moment of pure inspiration. Nothing is ever so right, of course. Baseball was probably first played in some form by Irish immigrant boys, pegging each other in rank city alleys. And the game only became popular, truly American, when gamblers took to it, when there was profit to be made off the fastest and strongest boy in the neighborhood.
