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Posted By: Corey R. Shanus

To my knowledge no credible baseball historian believes Abner Doubleday had anything to do with the invention of baseball, period. And that the Mills Commission was nothing more than a ruse by Albert Spalding to capitalize on the patriotism extant in the aftermath of the Spanish American War to Americanize baseball and, in the process, sell some more of his sporting equipment. Probably the most prominant baseball historian of the period, Henry Chadwick, regarded the Mills Commission findings as a joke and something not to be taken seriously. The fact that a form of baseball might have been played in Cooperstown in or around 1839 is irrelevant because there is ample documentation that both the name baseball as well as many, if not all, of its current rules long predate 1839. Just the fact that Abner Doubleday is not even a member of the HOF tells enough what knowledgable people think of his association to baseball.