ABSTRACT
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, professional baseball became the nation's most entrenched and mature professional sport. In a nation that comprised a multiplicity of ethnic, racial, and religious groups, one without a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a long, mystic past, the experience of playing, watching, and talking about baseball games became one of the great common denominators. Appropriate to baseball's embodiment of the nation's character, the custodians of the national game nurtured a creation myth. In 1907, a special commission of men of "high repute and undoubted knowledge of the Base Ball" issued a report that placed an official stamp on the legend that Army officer Abner Doubleday had invented baseball at Cooperstown, New York, in the summer of 1839. According to baseball legend, a small boy approached "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, one of the alleged conspirators and a star outfielder with the Chicago White Sox.
