Doubleday Doubletake

It seems so simple, so pure. But behind the green grass and iconic heroes, professional baseball has always been driven by greed, ambition, a thirst for fame, a lust for power, and a ceaseless conflict of motives that go far beyond winning and losing. Peel back the veneer with The Deadball Files.

This critically acclaimed series features present-day mysteries and legal dramas grounded in events and personalities from the early days of baseball.

For a century or more, Abner Doubleday was credited with inventing the modern game of baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. His name is on historical markers, playing fields, and for a time, even a professional baseball team. The Hall of Fame opened in Cooperstown on the hundredth anniversary of his invention.

Doubleday was a military hero, the kind of man who should have invented baseball. And the idyllic Village of Cooperstown was the kind of place it should have been invented.

More recently, baseball historians have discounted Doubleday's role altogether. Some have gone so far as to speculate that, being long dead when the myth was created around 1905, Doubleday was a convenient foil for a conspiracy led by Albert Spalding to set in stone the American roots of the game.

What if the historians are right? And wrong? At the same time? What if we have only begun to grasp the true dimensions of the mystery surrounding Abner Doubleday and the origins of baseball?

Discover the history as you unravel the mystery.