Might it be James Fenimore Cooper?
On the question of who might properly be termed the Father of Baseball if not Cooperstown’s favorite son, Abner Doubleday, Hugh MacDougall, Historian of that bucolic villge on Lake Otsego , wrote to SABR’s 19th-century listserv in 2004:
“Might I suggest a new candidate, as the thermometer here in Cooperstown drops. Tongue in cheek, might I propose James Fenimore Cooper — who may not have invented baseball (indeed, Cooperstown banned ball playing on its streets as early as 1816), but who may well have provided [in his 1838 novel Home as Found] the earliest literary description of a baseball game — and as it would turn out, located it precisely on what is now the site of the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame here in Cooperstown.”
Predictably, I took the bait:
“Home as Found does provide, as far as I know, the first mention of ball play in an America novel (remember, the word “base ball” is not employed), a distinction of sorts, I suppose. My literary opinion of Cooper (yup, I was an English major back in the day, at Flintstone U.) is the same as Mark Twain’s: that the prose is dreadful and the stories contrived. Of our two early giants, Cooper and Irving, I’ll take Irving. Yet Cooper is important, and not only because he was once famous — so was Mrs. Southworth. Cooper was to prose what Thomas Cole was to painting: an American original despite his classical leanings, and a beacon for those who followed in the nativist tradition.
“What does this have to do with baseball? In its sport as in its arts and politics, America strove to stand on its own feet, to be unshackled from European — and especially British — tradition. Why did cricket fall to the wayside? Not just because it was slow, genteel, and required leisure of the sort unavailable to the working class. It was just too damn British, like the novels of Bulwer-Lytton or the paintings of Gainsborough.”
It is fun, every now and then, to strut forth for my friends a bit of what I have picked up along the way besides baseball. This is what Cooper had to say of ball play in Cooperstown:
“Do you refer to the young men on the lawn, Mr. Effington? . . . Why, sir, I believe they have always played ball in that precise locality.”
He called out in a wheedling tone to their ringleader, a notorious street brawler. “A fine time for sport, Dickey; don’t you think there would be more room in the broad street than on this crowded lawn, where you lose our ball so often in the shrubbery?”
“This place will do, on a pinch,’ bawled Dickey, ‘though it might be better. If it warn’t for the plagued house, we couldn’t ask for a better ball-ground. . . .”
“Well, Dickey . . . , there is no accounting for tastes, but in my opinion, the street would be a much better place to play ball in than this lawn. . . . There are so many fences hereabouts . . . It’s true the village trustees say there shall be no ball-playing in the street, but I conclude you don’t much mind what they say or threaten.”
“Well,” I said of Cooper’s description, “it’s a description of ball play of some sort (with or without a bat). But to call this Cooper excerpt a reference to baseball is a yarn of the sort Cooperstown has spun out before. Literary references to ball play prior to 1816 are abundant, in a variety of cultures. See, for example, ‘The scholars of every school have their ball, or baton, in their hands; the ancient and wealthy men of the city come forth on horseback to see the sport of the young men. . . .’ (From Sports and Pastimes of Old Time Used in This City [i.e., London — JT], Fitzstephen, ca. 1175–83.)
“But if the emphasis to be on early literary representations of ball play,
one might look to the Icelandic saga Grettir the Strong (14th century). In
Section XV, GAMES AT MIDFJORDVATN, we find:
These youths used to play at ball together at Midfjord Water. Those from
Midfjord and from Vididal used to meet there, and there came many from
Vestrhop and Vatnsnes with some from Hrutafjord. Those who came from afar
used to lodge there. Those who were about equal in the ball-game were
matched together, and generally they had much fun in the autumn. Grettir
went to the sports when he was fourteen years old at the request of his
brother Atli. The parties were made up. Grettir was matched against Audun,
the youth already mentioned, who was a few years the elder. Audun struck the ball over Grettir’s head so that he could not reach it, and it bounded far
away over the ice. Grettir lost his temper, thinking he had done it out of
mischief, but he fetched the ball, brought it back and going up to Audun
drove it straight into his forehead, so that the skin was broken.” [and more
in this sanguinary vein — JT].
“Then, sticking to the literary remnants of ball play, there’s the celebrated poem in the 1744 Little Pretty Pocket-Book, published by John Newbery, and
Jane Austen’s mention of not merely ball but base-ball in her 1798 novel Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, after her death.
“I feel as if it is ‘piling on’ to quibble with Cooper after treating Doubleday so rudely and challenging Cartwright. All the same, Cooper’s mention of ball play in Home as Found is not even very early, let alone ‘the earliest description of a baseball game.’”
Like any successful notion, baseball (that is, the game as we would recognize it today) has many fathers — I’d nominate at least these: Cartwright, Adams, Chadwick, Harry Wright, Hulbert, and Spalding, with a nod to Creighton [that’s what I thought in 2004; today I would add William R. Wheaton]. Town ball may have many more fathers, but what are their names? The Knickerbockers may have been dwarves who stood on the shoulders of the giants of old, but their innovations were critical, and I agree with Fred Ivor-Campbell that without them, baseball as a game worthy of adult involvement might not have survived.
Tom Gilbert’s notion that somehow we (those of us who are poking around in
baseball pre-1857) are asking the wrong questions and thus deriving the
wrong answers throws me back to the schoolboy debate over whether the man makes the the age or the age makes the man. Absent Cartwright (Adams,
Chadwick, Hulbert, et al.), would baseball have turned just out the same,
only later perhaps? Does history throw up heroes as destiny requires or do
men shape the future through individual spark? Do we agree with Carlyle or
align with Leibniz? We won’t get to the bottom of that one anytime soon.
Tom Gilbert is right to perceive that there is no essential dilemma in the conflicting claims of paternity: Monica Nucciarone is not attempting to replace the plaster saint of Doubleday with one of Cartwright, nor am I advocating for Adams to the exclusion of others. Baseball evolved, and David Block’s forthcoming book [Baseball Before We Knew It, 2005] will smash some other bric-a-brac notions of the game’s origins. Where Tom may be wrong is in supposing that there is a right question to ask. There are many worthwhile questions, many of which will have satisfying if not bulletproof answers.
While it is worthwhile to identify key influences along the trail of baseball’s development, as with that of jazz or cinema or any other thing, it is also worthwhile to attempt to know what may, after arduous research,
be knowable about the distant past, through demonstrable fact and reasonable surmise.
It is not for anyone [on this SABR list] to prescribe or proscribe the research
interests or activities of others, to declare certain problems solved for
all time (as the Mills Commission once did) because they have been solved to
their own satisfaction. In my view, and in my experience, so much remains to be done in the pre-1857 period, in part because previous scholarship was driven by dubious premises, and in part because there remain not only alternative explanations but fresh explorations.
For example, I think the Civil War has been a too-convenient explanation for the fading of cricket and the rise of baseball. I also think the rude elements of the Massachusetts Game that made it so much fun to play and to watch succumbed to the more genteel, scientific, and rational New York Game for moralistic and nationalistic reasons having little to do with the intrinsic merits of the game. But I digress.
Ask different questions, by all means, and share your answers with the
group. Why did the New York Game succeed? Why did the Massachusetts Game fail? Why did the town-ball variant played by the Olympics of Philadelphia disappear, though it had been formalized with a constitution, by-laws, clubhouse, and rules in 1833, when Cartwright was 13 years old? These are all good, interesting questions, to which I and others in our group would be pleased to offer modest, tentative answers.
Searching for the Father of Baseball was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.