For the first half of the 20th century, the origin of baseball was clear enough: A man named Abner Doubleday invented America’s pastime in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, the present home of the Hall of Fame. It was a good story, especially since Doubleday went on to fight in the Civil War and was instrumental in the defense of Gettysburg as an acting Union Commander.

Unfortunately it wasn’t remotely true. The Doubleday as baseball’s inventor story was popularized by Al Spalding, a former major league player turned sporting goods magnate. In 1905 Spalding, a patriotic type, wanted to prove that baseball was invented by an American. So he formed a group, The Mill’s Commission, to look into baseball’s beginning.

As they gathered evidence, the commission received a letter from an elderly man named Albert Graves who claimed he was there when Doubleday invented baseball on that fateful Cooperstown field. Well, that was enough for Spaulding. He had his American and a war hero to boot!

The only problem is that Graves was crazy. Legitimately nuts, and declared legally insane by a court not long after he wrote his letter to the Commission. (He was on trial because he murdered his wife.) Of course that doesn’t mean he was making up what he saw in Cooperstown. However, years later, when subsequent investigators looked into Doubleday they found that he couldn’t have possibly been in Cooperstown when baseball was supposedly invented because there were clear records of him being at West Point during that time period, getting ready for his military career.

Furthermore, Doubleday was a man who kept detailed records and diaries. Yet he suspiciously never mentioned that he invented — or had anything to do with — the game that had started to become quite popular during his lifetime.

In the story of baseball, Doubleday was sort of the Christopher Columbus figure — the guy who had long been celebrated as being first, but that nobody still thinks was really first.  However, Columbus did at least really cross the Atlantic and land in the New World, whereas there is no evidence Doubleday ever even touched a baseball!

So if not Doubleday, who invented baseball? Kind of like who discovered America, nobody knows for sure.

For many years Alexander Cartwright was thought to be the inventor of baseball. And no doubt Cartwright was a big figure in the game’s early development as a co-founder in 1845 of the Knickerbocker Club, which came up with modern baseball rules such as nine on a side, nine innings a game and 90 feet between the bases. (We think we can guess what the Knickerbocker’s club’s favorite number was.)

But, again, subsequent research shows that Cartwright couldn’t have thought up baseball all by himself because he was out West suffering from dysentery, and not back home in New York with his Knickerbocker club brothers, when many of the key rules of modern baseball were first implemented.

So while Cartwright surely had a hand in molding the modern game, so did other club members like William Tucker, Daniel Adams, Duncan Curry, and William Wheaton. Yet none of these men have a plaque in Cooperstown, like Cartwright does.  Nor were any of these pioneers officially recognized as baseball’s inventor by the United States’ Congress, as Cartwright was in 1953.

Ayway, developing the modern game isn’t the same as inventing baseball, whether it was done by one man or a group of men. And there is evidence of the word “base ball” used in reference to a baseball-like stick and ball going back to America’s colonial times, a hundred years before even Doubleday was said to have come up with the game.

Most scholars believe that baseball evolved from two English games: rounders and cricket. (Which wouldn’t have made Old Spalding happy.) Like with many things that evolve slowly over time, it’s just about impossible to pin down when baseball was “invented,” let alone who did it.

And that is your admittedly unsatisfactory answer to the question of “who invented baseball?”

Baseball has been around a long time, and many interesting things have happened during its history. Here are 23 cool facts about America’s pastime.

Prior to 1931, any fly ball that bounced over the outfield fence was a home run.
Amazingly, Babe Ruth was never credited with one of these one-hop homers, so he would have 660 even if the current home run rule had always been in place. Sluggers Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx and Rogers Hornsby did each pick up a few homers this way.

The average life of a baseball in the Majors is six pitches.
A lot of cows, cork, rubber and wool dies so we can play our national pastime.

Every MLB ball is covered in mud that comes from a secret location in New Jersey that just one man knows.
And that man is Jim Bintliff, who owns the mud rubbing company. Take him out, and we’re playing cricket.

Between 1885 and 1893 one side of the bat could be flat.
Apparently in the nineteenth century they were better prepared for a sudden move to cricket.

Gaylord Perry homered right after they put a man on the moon — just as his manager had jokingly predicted.
Sometime during the mid 60s, San Francisco Giants’ manager Alvin Dark sarcastically commented that light-hitting pitcher Gaylord Perry would hit a home when a man landed on the moon. Then in 1969, just 20 minutes after Neil Armstrong made one small step for mankind, Perry went deep for the first time in his career. You can’t make this stuff up.

Only 347 fans showed up for a Florida Marlins Cincinnati Reds game in 2011.
While the temptation is to blame Marlins’ cheapskate owner Jeffrey Loria for the lowest recorded attendance in Major League history, the real culprit here is Hurricane Irene.

Alan Embree won a game without throwing a pitch.
The Rockies’ relief pitcher entered a 4-4 tie with the Nationals with two outs in top of the eighth and promptly picked the runner off of first base. The Rockies took the lead for good in the bottom of the inning and Embree didn’t return for the ninth. And that is why a relief pitcher’s win/loss record means just about nothing.

Don Baylor managed to played in three straight World Series for three different teams.
Don Baylor was a pretty good ball player, and an even better good luck charm. Between 1986 and 1988 he made the World Series with Boston, Minnesota and then Oakland. Instead of ensuring a fourth team a trip to the Fall Classic, Baylor retired after the 88 season.

The odds of spectator being injured by a baseball at a MLB game are 300,000 to 1.
But the odds of being caught on camera when you drop a foul ball are 1 to 1.

The shortest player in Major League history is Eddie Gaedel, who was the three feet, seven inches tall.
In 1951, owner and showman Bill Veeck sent Gaedel in the game as a pinch hitter. Thanks to his tiny strike zone, he walked. Gaedel was promptly banned under the “making a mockery of the game” clause, causing Veeck to question whether five-foot-six inch Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto should be allowed to play.

The tallest player in Major League history is pitcher Jon Rauch, who is six feet, eleven inches tall.

Rauch may also have most aggressive neck tattoo in the history of the game.

Jimmy Piersall celebrated his 100th home run by running the bases backwards.
Washington Senator outfielder Jimmy Piersall was always a bit nutty. (In fact, he had spent time in an institution for “exhaustion” early in his career.) But he may have veered from crazy to just bad taste when he ran the bases backwards following his 100 homerun.

Brothers Mike and Bob Garbank brothers finished a season with the exact same batting average.
In 1944, each brother hit 261. Both catchers, they also each finished their careers throwing out 39 percent of base runners. Let’s call it sibling symmetry

Some MLB players pee on their hands instead of wearing batting gloves to improve their grip.
Moises Alou, who ended his career with 332 homers and .302 batting average, was the leading adherent to this unhygienic practice. Well, as long as he’s not peeing on your hands.

Clarence Blethen injured himself with his own false teeth.
They were in his back pocket when as he slide into second and he had to leave the game because of excessive bleeding. Yeah, it would have been more funny if had injured himself when they had still been in his mouth.

Each baseball game has 12,386,344 possible plays.
We can’t even figure out how somebody or something figured that out.

Joel Youngblood got a hit for two different teams in two different cities on the same day.
Youngblood started August 4, 1982 as a Met and got a hit in their afternoon game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Later during the contest he was pulled from the game and traded to Montreal, arriving in time for the Expos’ road game in Philadelphia, where he got another hit. Both the pitchers he recorded the hits off — Ferguson Jenkins and Steve Carlton — are Hall of Famers

Deion Sanders is the only person to hit an MLB home run and score an NFL touchdown in the same week.
Take that, Bo Jackson

Cal Hubbard is the only person in both the Football and Baseball Hall of Fame.
Take that, Deion Sanders. (Although Hubbard did make the Baseball Hall of Fame as an umpire, which is kind of cheating.)

Warren Spahn finished with as many career wins as hits.
Warren Spahn finished his career with 363 wins, the sixth most all-time and the most in the live ball era. Less impressive is the fact that he recorded 363 hits for his career. (Although his 35 career home runs are the third most ever for a pitcher.)

Stan Musial recorded the same number of career hits at home and on the road.
1815 of Stan The Man’s 3630 hits were at home and 1815 were away. Not that’s a consistent hitter.

The Minnesota Twins are the only team to ever turn two triple plays in one game.
And they still managed to lose the 1990 contest to the Red Sox.