From 2002's The Faith of 50 Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture by Christopher H. Evans.
The twin virtues of baseball, as a rural "pastoral" game played by young boys and as a manly professional sport, came together around the remarkable career of one man, Albert Goodwill Spalding. Almost single-handedly, Spalding manufactured one of the great myths that remains to this day the centerpiece for understanding the civil religion of baseball: the belief that the game was "invented" in 1839 by the future Civil War hero General Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York.
The alleged invention of baseball by Doubleday not only gave to baseball a compelling creation story, it also gave the sport a sacred place of origin that corroborated claims that the sport was uniquely American. As Benjamin Rader notes, "As Jews and Christians have their Jerusalem and Moslems their Mecca, baseball fans now had their special place, the pastoral village of Cooperstown."
Tags: The Faith of 50 Million, Baseball, Religion
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