By Nicholas Acocella Part 5c - The Doubleday Myth (3) The village of Cooperstown, nestled at the southern tip of Lake Oswego, is admittedly beautiful. Perhaps, if baseball's origins had been rural instead of urban, the game should have been born there. But baseball is more than a myth to the village of Cooperstown; it is the major source of the community's tourist trade and the basis of its economy. No one there -- or, for that matter, in organized baseball, which has so much, both financial and otherwise, invested in the place -- is going to gainsay the Doubleday hoax, or entertain the possibility that Alexander Cartwright and Hoboken can supplant their "inventor" and their claim. (Also, the village has a near stock in trade in hoaxes, Another of its popular attractions is the Cardiff Giant, a stone statue that was once advertised as the petrified remains of an oversized man. Another attraction, less well known, is a "historical" marker on the eastern shore of Lake Oswego, the Glimmerglass of several of James Fenimore Cooper's novels; the plaque purports to mark the place where Chingachgook, Natty Bumppo's companion in The Leatherstocking Tales, repaired to die. The only difficulty, of course, is that the last of the Mohicans was a fictional character.) And then there is Doubleday himself. Born in Ballston Spa, 65 northeast of Cooperstown, and schooled in Auburn, 85 miles northwest of that village, he is an unwitting and unlikely party to the conspiracy. There is no record of him ever having set foot in the place with which his name has been linked in baseball lore. Nor could he have been there when Graves said he invented the national pastime to accommodate the boys at Otsego Academy and Green's Select School: In 1839, at the very time he was supposed to be drawing a diagram of the first baseball diamond in the Cooperstown dirt, he was, in fact, a West Point plebe, and ineligible for leave. Doubleday later had a distinguished career, rising to the rank of major general during the Civil War. He wrote extensive memoirs without ever once mentioning baseball. Since he died in 1893, he was not around to protest the unwarranted use of his name by Graves, Spalding, and Mills. By all accounts a gentleman of integrity, he might very well have done so, and directly, since he and Mills were old war buddies who belonged to the same veterans group. (Aside from his friendship with Mills, who served as one of the general's pallbearers, the only known connection between Doubleday and baseball is that one of his descendants is currently the majority owner of the New York Mets.) Perhaps most damning to the hoax is that baseball officialdom has never been imprudent enough to award Doubleday a Cooperstown plaque. If he were so honored, the inscription writers would have to look no further than the judgment of Branch Rickey, then a St. Louis Cardinal executive, who, referring to the fact that Doubleday commanded the battery that fired the fist shot from the Union side at Fort Sumter in 1861, said, "The only thing that Doubleday started was the Civil War." 
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