Baseball Origins Committee

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The Baseball Origins Committee is a 12-person pannel of experts appointed by Commissioner Bud Selig on March 15, 2011, to study the question of baseball's true origins.

The traditional myth about the creation of baseball, promoted by Albert Spalding and others at the beginning of the 20th century, was that Civil War hero Abner Doubleday had laid down the first baseball field in 1839 in rural Cooperstown, NY. As a result, baseball celebrated its centennial in 1939 based on that legend; the opening of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown was timed to coincide with the centennial. However, by then, the myth had been debunked in favor of giving baseball origins in New York City in the 1840s, with Alexander Cartwright being assigned the most prominent role in laying down baseball's modern rules. That version also began to take on water towards the end of the 20th century, and in 2011, John Thorn, who had just been appointed the official historian of Major League Baseball, published the book Baseball in the Garden of Eden, which pointed towards much older origins for the game. The committee was struck to address the controversy in a more scientific manner.

The Committee is composed as follows:

• John Thorn, Chairman, author of Baseball in the Garden of Eden and official historian of Major League Baseball;
• David Block, Historian, author of Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game;
• James Edward Brunson, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs at Northern Illinois University and author of The Early Image of Black Baseball: Race and Representation in the Popular Press;
• Adrian Burgos, Jr., Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois; author of Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line;
• Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker;
• Len Coleman, former President of the National League;
• Doris Kearns Goodwin, Presidential Historian;
• Steve Hirdt, Executive Vice President of the Elias Sports Bureau;
• Jane Leavy, author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy;
• Larry McCray, researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and coordinator of "Project Protoball" documenting bat and ball games played before 1860; and
• George Will, columnist, author of Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball.

It should be noted that Thorn, Block, Burgos, Hirdt, Leavy and McCray are all members of the Society for American Baseball Research, which has its own "Origins of Baseball" committee.

Related Sites

• Press Release from MLB