Doubleday Park

Doubleday Park

After the Sacramento Solons were acquired from the St. Louis Cardinals by the local Sacramento Baseball Association in 1944, Cardinal Field no longer seemed like a suitable name for the team's ballpark. So one of the Sacramento newspapers ran a contest to choose a new name for the field at Riverside and Broadway. The name selected was Doubleday Park, after the man generally credited with inventing the game of baseball.

If General Abner Doubleday ever dreamed of going down in the history books, it probably would have been for returning the first shots at Fort Sumter during the start of the Civil War, or for his courageous fighting at the battles of Gettysburg, Antietam, South Mountain, Fredricksberg and Bull Run. He might even have imagined being remembered for obtained a charter for the cable car railway, which still runs in San Francisco. He did all of that. In his wildest dreams, however, he could never have predicted that he would be celebrated in posterity as the creator of a game that was to become known as America's national pasttime. In fact, although he kept detailed journals, Doubleday never mentioned anything about inventing the game or even playing it.

So the good general would have been especially surprised to know that such a structure in Sacramento would be dedicated in his honor more than 50 years after his death. His feelings of guilt about it would have been short lived however. The following year, the park was renamed again after Dick Edmonds, the young newspaper sports editor who spearheaded the move which saved the team from being moved to Tacoma and led the coalition of local businessmen who purchased the franchise from the Cardinals.

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