Deeply embedded in the folklore of American sports is the story of baseball's supposed invention by a young West Point cadet, Abner Doubleday, in the summer of 1839 at the village of Cooperstown, New York. Because of the numerous types of baseball, or rather games similar to it, the origin of the game has been disputed for decades by sports historians all over the world. In 1839, in Cooperstown, New York, Doubleday supposedly started the great game of baseball. Doubleday, also a famous Union general in the Civil War, was said to be the inventor of baseball by Abner Graves, an elderly miner from New York. In response to the question of where baseball first originated, major league owners summoned a committee in 1907. Abner Graves stepped before the committee and gave his testimony. In Graves' account of "the first game," the Otsego Academy and Cooperstown's Green's Select School played against one another in 1839. Committeeman Albert G. Spalding, the founder of Spalding's Sporting Goods, favored Graves' declaration and convinced the other committeemen that Graves' account was true. As a result, in 1939, the committee and the State of New York named Cooperstown and Abner Doubleday as the birthplace and inventor of baseball, respectively. Today, many baseball historians still doubt the testimony of Abner Graves. Historians say the story came from the creative memory of one very old man and was spread by a superpatriotic sporting goods manufacturer, determined to prove that baseball was a wholly American invention. .
According to Doubleday's diary, he was not playing baseball in Cooperstown, but attending school at West Point on that day in 1839. Also, historians have found that nowhere in Doubleday's diary has he ever "claimed to have had anything to do with baseball, and may never have even seen a game." This leads many to the conclusion that Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball, but it is still a disputed and provocative issue.