An Opinion of Doubleday
I’m reading Kevin Baker’s book The New York Game, which is a history of baseball in New York City from the game’s early days to 1945. In addition to being a discussion of baseball, it is a fantastic portrait of the city itself and its varying eras. The description of New York (which was only Manhattan prior to 1898) and Brooklyn in the mid-19th Century is illuminating.
It also contains this interesting characterization of Abner Doubleday: Abner Doubleday was the Forrest Gump of the nineteenth century, a soldier, mystic, and bibliophile with an uncanny ability for being on hand when anything of interest was going on. Feel free to make of that what you will.
He was stationed in San Francisco from 1869 through 1871 and he took out a patent for the cable car railway that still runs there
Fort Sumter and Gettysburg.
In true Forrest Gump fashion he’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery, one of the last sagas of the Civil War in the important Section 1 right behind Robert E. Lee’s house! Baseball fans still come today to pay their respects at his gravesite!
It’s nice that baseball fans pay their respects to Doubleday at Arlington, but he is wrongly credited with being the father of American baseball. Doubleday did help to popularize the game because his men played a version of it during downtime. Alexander Cartwright is really the father of American baseball.
Doubleday’s diary, which has been published, is a short, engaging read in which he details being inside Fort Sumter during the bombardment by the South Carolina militia in April 1861.