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 didnt 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 todays 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 dont 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