ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, June 3, 1996 TAG: 9606030030
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: George F. WIll
SOURCE: GEORGE F. WILL
THIS COULD get ugly. Uglier. New Jersey and New York are at daggers drawn over bragging rights as the birthplace of baseball.
Some people think that is something to apologize for, not brag about. Remember the football fan who, told that the American hostages returned from Iran were given passes to major league parks, asked, ``Haven't they suffered enough?'' Still, the dispute poisoning relations along the lower Hudson River illuminates the problematic nature of our national fascination with pinpointing origins.
The fiercest skirmishing about baseball's birth is in the U.S. Senate, where the heat of passion often is inversely proportional to the gravity of the subject. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey wants June 19 declared National Baseball Day. His resolution originally was supported by New York's Pat Moynihan, who at that point was somewhat of a latitudinarian regarding baseball's provenance. Moynihan has since defected to the Alfonse D'Amato insurgency.
Lautenberg says that 150 years ago on June 19, ``baseball's first game was played.'' That is a bit strong, but as is said in Washington, it's true enough for government work. On June 19, 1846, a team of New Yorkers called the Knickerbockers invited another team to play a game at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J. Lautenberg does not explain how it was that many organized baseball teams existed prior to baseball's ``first game,'' but never mind.
Never mind that some historians say the Knickerbockers began playing in Madison Square in 1842. Or that Boston and New York versions of base ball - it was two words then - had for several decades been evolving from the British game of rounders. Or that the diary of a soldier at Valley Forge refers to a game of ``base.'' The game Lautenberg calls ``baseball's first,'' played under rules codified by Alexander Cartwright, was recognizably the antecedent of today's game - at least as recognizably antecedent of modern baseball as Cro-Magnon man is antecedent of thee and me.
On June 19, 1846, the bases were still not 90 feet apart, and for several decades pitchers stood 45 feet instead of 60 feet 6 inches from home plate, and threw underhand. Never mind. Who can object to giving Hoboken a claim to fame?
D'Amato, that's who. He, now joined by Moynihan, wants Sept. 23 declared ``National Baseball Heritage Day'' because on that day in 1845 the Knickerbockers began playing regular games on a meadow in Manhattan's Murray Hill section.
D'Amato's resolution begins with a bugle blast of New York chauvinism: ``Whereas it is universally accepted that the idea of baseball was created by Abner Doubleday in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, when Doubleday attempted to chase cows out of Elihu Phinney's cow pasture. ... ''
Actually, Doubleday spent the summer of 1839 as a plebe at West Point, preparing for a military career that in 1893 earned him a handsome New York Times obituary that did not mention baseball. It was not until 1907 that a commission appointed by major league owners concocted the Doubleday story - what one historian calls baseball's myth of immaculate conception - on the basis of one letter from an elderly man who later died in an insane asylum. Never mind. Moynihan breezily says, ``Baseball was born in Cooperstown in 1839. The New York State Highway sign near Doubleday Field outside the Baseball Hall of Fame says so.'' So there.
Baseball is magnificently brazen about asserting origins. Candy Cummings' plaque in Cooperstown's Hall of Fame says: ``Pitched first curveball in baseball history.'' In 1867. Real baseball fans just flat know that the seventh-inning stretch started because a 300-pound fan, President Taft, finding his seat confining, rose to stretch during one seventh inning, and fans rose out of respect, and have been rising in seventh innings ever since.
Precision about origins is appropriate in the national pastime of a nation that knows precisely when it got going: July 4, 1776. Not that there hasn't been a rhubarb about that. Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863 made a point of pinpointing the nation's birth fourscore and seven years earlier, at the Declaration of Independence. He did so because some wily Confederates were arguing that the country came into existence in 1789, with the ratification of the Constitution, which was, they said, a compact among sovereign states which therefore retained a right to secede.
Lincoln had sound reasoning and, more important, the bigger army, so his view prevailed. It did so with the help of Gen. Abner Doubleday who, before he fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter. So in a sense he really did start something. Just not something as important as baseball.
Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Medium: 85 linesby CNB