“Pin-Up” of the Week: 1996 National Baseball Hall of Fame Abner Doubleday 100th Anniversary

Here is another pin from my collection.  Its not one that you see very often.  This was an impulse buy while attending the National Sports Collectors Convention in 2009.  I’d never seen it before, and didn’t know that much about it.  I still don’t know that much about it.  The pin commemorates the 100th anniversary of when the first baseball game was played in 1839.  Its dated 1996 on the back, along with the National Baseball Hall of Fame name.

Abner Doubleday is the supposed inventor of baseball.  Most baseball historians don’t believe this though.  There simply just isn’t enough evidence to prove it.  I don’t think he did.  Doubleday was a cadet at West Point at the time he is said to have invented the game.  His family didn’t live in Cooperstown, New York anymore at that time either.  I think people were looking for the game’s origin, and decided to pin it on Doubleday.  They based it all on a lot of blurry-eyed loose stories.  Despite all this lack of credible evidence, the Baseball Hall of Fame was built in Cooperstown.  Doubleday Field was built on the cow pasture where Abner Doubleday is said to invented the game.  That’s where they play the Hall of Fame Game each year.  As long as the Baseball Hall of Fame is located in Cooperstown, the Doubleday myth will always be a subject fans will talk about.  I don’t see them moving it anytime soon.