COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. -- By now, pretty much everybody knows that the game of baseball was not invented in this little hamlet of upstate New York, along the shores of Otsego Lake.
Abner Doubleday, the mythical inventor, did not in fact invent it. Baseball had been played in nascent forms long before 1839, the year in which Doubleday supposedly but not really invented the game. Baseball's story did not begin in a cow pasture in Cooperstown. The myth is a false tune written by tycoons like Al Spalding.