FanHouse JaneAusten

As a blogger with no real job, I spend most of my day loading and refreshing FanHouse, looking for something to write about. Imagine my shock and dismay yesterday upon seeing Tom Fornelli's report that Jane Austen invented the game of baseball.

Frankly, this changes everything. From now on I'm going to start writing Dugouts in the spirit of which the game itself was created. I'm going to wear a hat in the style of Abraham Lincoln to my next pick-up game, and I'm going to film at least six new innings for Ken Burns' Baseball to be played before the program that feature men and women about to play baseball, but handicapped by their inability to tell the opposing side whether their runner was safe or out.

Today's Dugout is after the jump.

Baseball has long been known as America's Pastime, as it was supposedly first invented by Civil War general Abner Doubleday back in 1839. This has long been the accepted truth about baseball's creation, but in recent years it's starting to look more and more likely that Doubleday had nothing to do with inventing the sport.

After all, he never took credit for it, and after his death Doubleday left a lot of papers and letters to his family. None of them ever mentioned baseball. So if Abner Doubleday didn't invent baseball, just who in the hell did? Well, if you were to ask a couple of Brits, they'd tell you it was author Jane Austen.