Let's Re-Visit The Great Debate

[raulus]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

I don't see why that would be. Much of the staying power of the Called Shot is its ambiguity and Ruth's own shifting story.

I think you’re probably right, at least for a small subset of the population that includes people around here.

For the rest of the country/world, my sense is that the legend is already so well socialized that it has legs and will endure regardless of the facts. It’s just that ingrained.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by raulus

I think you’re probably right, at least for a small subset of the population that includes people around here.

For the rest of the country/world, my sense is that the legend is already so well socialized that it has legs and will endure regardless of the facts. It’s just that ingrained.

Well you may be right, we see every day how people can just deny or ignore established facts.

[molenick]

I wonder if there is some analogy here to the Abner Doubleday legend. The assertion that he invented baseball was disputed by Henry Chadwick even before it was made public, questioned in print by William Henry Irwin as early as 1909, and essentially disproved by Robert Henderson and others leading up to the 1939 "centennial".

I would think anyone on this board and any more-than-casual baseball fan knows that Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. But for the casual or non-baseball fan, I think many still consider Abner Doubleday as the inventor of baseball. They certainly know his name more than they do Cartwright or any of the other members of the Knickerbockers who some feel have more (or at least equal) claim to being baseball's "inventor" (Adams, Tucker, Wadsworth, and Wheaton).

I think even if we somehow disproved that Babe called his shot, the legend will continue to be accepted. Especially because it is true that he actually did hit a home run and did make some kind of gesture before doing so, whereas Doubleday had no connection to baseball at all.

[Peter_Spaeth]

On the basis of what evidence did the Mills commission conclude Doubleday was the inventor?

[packs]

I've always liked this Root album page and photo I picked up:

[molenick]

It is a long story best recounted elsewhere, but essentially it was from a letter the commission received from Abner Graves who was five in 1839 and who claimed to have seen Doubleday (who was in West Point at the time) modify town ball to what is now recognizable as baseball. I believe the commission added to Graves' claim some things that were not the letter (such as setting the distance between the bases). I believe Graves also sent them an old baseball purported to be from the game.

Graves was 71 when he wrote the letter which some claim may have led to "inaccurate memories" but as I get closer to that age, I would not like to think that I will all of a sudden lose my memory when I get there. But he was recollecting events from many years in his past. Apparently he made other false claims, such as being a member of the Pony Express in 1852 (it was started in 1860). And he was committed to a psychiatric hospital after shooting his wife.

I recommend David Block's Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game and Peter Morris's But Didn't We Have Fun?: An informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870 for further reading on this and other related topics.

[Eric72]

EDITED OUT MY ORIGINAL POST.

Michael (the post directly above) beat me to it...and was much more informative.