Baseball

The Americans would have you believe that baseball was invented by Civil War hero Abner Doubleday in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. Sadly for Abner, that’s just not true. The first record of baseball (actually base ball) comes from the English book A Little Pretty Pocket Book in 1744.

The Abner Doubleday story was put about by the States’ slightly paranoid baseball authorities in 1907. The fact that Doubleday never visited Cooperstown or mentioned any bat and ball games in his diaries seems to have been of little consequence.

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