Town Ball - Town Ball and The Doubleday Myth

Town Ball and The Doubleday Myth

Townball's role in the origins of baseball has been debated since the early 1900s, and the two sides of the debate stem from a friendly quarrel between an editor and his publisher. In the 1903 edition of Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide, editor Henry Chadwick, who was born in England, wrote "Just as the New York game was improved townball, so was townball an improved form of the two-centuries-old English game of rounders."

Albert Goodwill Spalding, star player, sports equipment entrepreneur, and publisher of the Spalding Guide, asserted that baseball's origins were American. Spalding wrote an article titled "The Origin and Early History of Baseball" for the January 15, 1905 Washington Post. He described the game of Four Old Cat, in which four throwers and four batsmen stand in four corners. "Some ingenious American lad" got the idea of placing one thrower in the center of the square, wrote Spalding. "This was for many years known as the old game of Town Ball, from which the present game of baseball no doubt had its origin, and not from the English children's picnic game of 'Rounders'."

Later, in 1905, Spalding organized a panel of experts known as the Mills Commission to investigate the issue. Abner Graves, whose testimony was the basis of the Mills Commission claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839, named townball as the "old" game that the boys of Cooperstown, New York played before baseball. In the townball game that Graves described, the batsman struck the tossed ball with a flat bat, and ran toward a goal fifty feet away, and back again. Graves said there were generally twenty to fifty boys in the field, which generated many collisions among those trying to catch the ball.