Baseball's Inventor Was a COMPLETE Fabrication

The man on baseball's origin plaque never touched a bat in his life.

In 1839, a Civil War general named Abner Doubleday supposedly invented baseball in a cow pasture in Cooperstown, New York. That story built an entire Hall of Fame. It's completely made up.

The tale came from one letter, written by a mining engineer named Abner Graves, decades later. There was just one problem. In 1839, Doubleday was a cadet at West Point, and first-year cadets weren't allowed to leave. He never mentioned baseball once in his diaries.

So who really did it? Members of a New York club, the Knickerbockers, wrote down the first modern rules in 1845, foul lines, bases, three outs an inning. Baseball wasn't born in a pasture. It grew up on the streets of Manhattan.

And Abner Graves, the man whose letter started it all? He later shot his wife and died in an asylum for the criminally insane.

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