Baseball had no single inventor or father. The so-called Abner Doubleday myth was made up 113 years ago for reasons that nobody today understands. Before that, baseball had a different origin story, that the game was invented by Alexander Cartwright and the Knickerbockers, but that story isn''t true either. Baseball''s stories about where it came from are not merely wrong, they are knowingly and deliberately wrong. Amateur baseball invented the Knickerbockers story; professional baseball invented Abner Doubleday. As different as they are, they have the same purpose, to help market baseball as a national sport. The truth is that the sport of baseball has hundreds of fathers. Most were part-time amateur athletes who lived in eastern cities during the 1850s and 1860s.

Until the very end of that period they played for the joy of it, without gloves, facemasks or performance incentives. Unlike today''s professional players, they had full lives outside of sports. The men who gave us our national pastime were hard at work building, shaping and defending a fragile young nation. They founded businesses and industries, practiced professions, ran for office, created great railroad networks, published newspapers and fought the Civil War. They also brought baseball to the mid-west, south and west. If you want to understand how baseball really happened, you have to get to know them. These early baseball men include the fussy and social climbing New York Knickerbockers of the 1840s and 1850s, who lent baseball their respectability but also helped make sure that African Americans were excluded. Publisher Thomas Fitzgerald, baseball''s man in Philadelphia and a friend of Abraham Lincoln, pushed back hard against racism in baseball.

Nativist, poet and journalist Walt Whitman praised baseball for its physicality and fraternity -- and because it was made in America. In 1860 Brooklyn public health reformer and physical fitness advocate Dr. Joseph B. Jones took his exciting Excelsiors club on the road to showcase what was then called the "New York game" to the rest of the country. Both Jones and Fitzgerald were allies of contemporary feminists, who encouraged girls and women to exercise and play sports. In Boston, the same teenagers who created American football founded one of the city''s first baseball clubs. Brooklyn Excelsiors star James Creighton invented fast, modern pitching, which led to the introduction of the strike zone in the 1860s. He was also the first pitcher to destroy his body from overwork.

The full story is actually worse than that. Baseball''s original goal was to become a popular participant sport, not an entertainment business. That changed when, to everyone''s surprise, crowds began to show up at baseball games in Brooklyn in the late 1850s. We fans weren''t invited to the party, but we crashed it and changed everything. Professionalism was not part of the plan either, but when an 1858 all-star series between the rival cities of Brooklyn and New York City accidentally proved that thousands of people would pay to watch a baseball game, the writing was on the outfield wall. The openly paid 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings travelled coast to coast while extending their famous 84-game undefeated streak. They have been credited by history with being the first baseball professionals, who ushered in an era of clean, corporate baseball. In fact, they were neither the first professional club nor, if you know the real story, entirely clean.

Almost none of baseball''s amateur fathers can be found in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The main reason is that the modern major leagues have never been very interested in other kinds of baseball. In 1871, the first professional baseball league was formed. But baseball was already a fully formed sport; it had nationally famous stars, paying fans, media coverage, statistics, ballparks and championships. The professional leagues invented themselves, but they did not invent the sport of baseball. Baseball''s amazing amateurs had already done that.