Reflecting on the appeal of history in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, heroine Catherine Morland comments, “I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.”
Indeed. And in no field of American endeavor is invention more rampant than in baseball, whose whole history is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community, and fair play. The game’s epic feats and revered figures, its pieties about racial harmony and bleacher democracy, its artful blurring of sport and business — all of it is bunk, tossed up with a wink and a nudge. Yet we love both the game and the flimflam because they are both so . . . American. Baseball has been blessed in equal measure by Lincoln and by Barnum.
Miss Austen’s novel, written in 1798, but published posthumously twenty years later, is today well known in baseball-history circles not for the passage above but for this one:
Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books — or at least books of information . . . .
Yet before April 1937, when Robert W. Henderson of the New York Public Library called public attention to this Austen reference to baseball, and to an even earlier woodcut of the game in John Newbery’s Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), few Americans knew that English boys and girls had played a game called baseball, whatever its rules may have been. Magnanimously, we had granted the Brits their primacy in cricket; some cosmopolites might go so far as to acknowledge a playing-fields link between their national game and ours — perhaps, as the early sportswriter Henry Chadwick claimed, through rounders — but baseball, well, that was our game.