Card of the Day: Abner Haynes 1961 Fleer #203

“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.

Card of the Day: Shawn Abner 1985 Topps #282

Card of the Day: Abner Doubleday ’08 UD SP Legendary Cuts

The Ultimate DNA Relic

 

If you thought the George Washington hair cards were strange, take a look at this.  This is suppose to be a piece of skin from Abner Doubleday.  For many years, historians have debated whether Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented the game of baseball.  This afternoon I came across this disturbing relic on The Baseball Reliquary.  The caption reads:

“This fragment of skin purportedly from the inner left thigh of Abner Doubleday (1819-1893) was discovered in a refrigerator in the basement of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1948. There is no record that this artifact was ever exhibited at the Hall of Fame; in fact, most professional curators would consider a relic of this nature far too disturbing for public display. All of which brings up the question of why this artifact would have been preserved in the first place. No one at the Hall of Fame seems to have an answer, although modern-day conspiracy theorists would no doubt offer a host of explanations. We do know that the Hall of Fame is based on a fiction, that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. Could the Hall of Fame at one time have intended to exhibit this artifact in tandem with the renowned “Doubleday baseball” to buttress this deception and anoint the Civil War general as a baseball deity?”

There are only a handful of cut signatures made of Doubleday, and absolutely no memorabilia cards.  I bet a few card companies would love to get their hands on this to create the ultimate DNA relic.