Baseball is the most studied and dissected and written about of all our sports. There is even a thriving Society For American Baseball Research But for all the work of these eager sports sleuths the origins of the two most basic elements of baseball remain shrouded in mystery; the game itself and, of course, the hot dog.

Baseball’s exact origin in the United States is a matter of ongoing debate. While
tradition holds that baseball was invented by a first-year West Point cadet named
Abner Doubleday in the small upstate New York village of Cooperstown in 1839, the
game has been noted as far back as 1778 by a Revolutionary War soldier in his diary
at Valley Forge.

Similarly there is no historical consensus for the mythical marriage of baseball and
the hot dog. The noble sausage has been kicking around since the time of the
ancient Romans but it didn’t become a hot dog until someone put it on a bun. That
apparently happened on the streets of New York in the 1860s, at the pushcarts of
German immigrants.

But how did they find their way to the ballpark? Legendary concessionaire Harry M.
Stevens is often credited with introducing the hot dog to America at the New York
Polo Grounds in the early 1900s. On a wintry April afternoon he was having trouble
pushing his usual wares of flavored ices and ice cream and ordered his vendors out
for as many hot sausages as they could find. He sold them to his shivering patrons
in the stands as being “red hot!” and the rest is, as they say, history.

But further broiling the controversy is none other than acerbic Baltimore
newspaperman H.L. Mencken, whose father was vice-president of the Washington
ball club. “I devoured hot dogs in Baltimore way back in 1886,” Mencken said, “and
they were then very far from newfangled. They contained precisely the same
rubbery, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they
leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard.

Some sources state unequivocally that German immigrant Christopher Von der Ahe,
a buffoon-like beer baron who would have been at home with some of today’s
blustery team owners, was selling hot dogs in his St. Louis park as early as the
1870s. Von der Ahe was known to sit down by the dugout and blow a loud whistle
whenever he wanted to get the attention of one of his players on the field or
whenever he wanted another hot dog.

So there you have it. The first baseball game and the first hot dog served up at a
ballgame - both lost to history. But just like you don’t want to go investigating too
deeply into how sausages are made, there is no need to dig too deep into their
historical origins. Just sit back and enjoy them them both this season.

copyright 2006

I am the author of over 20 books, including 8 on hiking with your dog, including the
widely praised The Canine Hiker’s Bible. As publisher of Cruden Bay Books, we
produce the innovative A Bark In The Park series of canine hiking books found at
http://www.hikewithyourdog.com. During the warm months I lead canine hikes as
tour leader for hikewithyourdog.com tours, leading packs of dogs and humans on
day and overnight trips. My lead dog is Katie, a German Shepherd-Border Collie mix,
who has hiked in all of the Lower 48 states and is on a quest to swim in all the great
waters of North America - http://web.mac.com/crudbay/iWeb/Katies%20Blog/Katies%20Quest.html I am currently building a hikewithyourdog.com tours trailer to
use on our expeditions and its progress can be viewed at http://web.mac.com/crudbay/iWeb/Teardrop%20Trailer/Building%20A%20Tour%20Trailer.html