This is wrong too, claims David Block, author of the new history ''Baseball Before We Knew It'' (Nebraska). A retired computer systems analyst and collector of early baseball books who lives in San Francisco, Block acknowledges that the early-19th-century game of rounders bears a close resemblance to baseball, right down to its diamond-shaped field. But he says that's because rounders is itself a version of an even older bat-and-ball game, one described in a 1796 German book of game rules (discovered by Block himself) as ''das englische Base-ball.'' Baseball, it seems, is America's homegrown version of ... baseball.
As for the Spalding-Doubleday connection, it's a tale out of Umberto Eco. Spalding claimed he hadn't heard of Doubleday until 1905. But according to Block, in 1900 Spalding became an active member of the Point Loma Community, a spiritual enclave in San Diego founded by the American Theosophical Society, one of whose early presidents was... Abner Doubleday. Spalding ''never publicly divulged the organizational ties he shared with the man he was anointing as baseball's inventor,'' writes Block. If he had, he opines, ''the Doubleday baseball creation story might never have gotten off the ground.''