The fascinating, true, story of baseball's amateur origins.
"Explores the conditions and factors that begat the game in the
19th century and turned it into the national pastime....A
delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love
from the first crack of the bat."-Paul Dickson, The Wall Street
Journal Baseball's true founders don't have plaques in Cooperstown.
The founders were the hundreds of uncredited amateurs - ordinary
people - who played without gloves, facemasks or performance
incentives in the middle decades of the 19th century. Unlike
today's pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They
worked, built businesses and fought against the South in the Civil
War. But that's not the way the story has been told. The wrongness
of baseball history can be staggering. You may have heard that
Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither
did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers
played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn't. You have read
that baseball's color line was uncrossed and unchallenged until
Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. You have been told that the clean,
corporate 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were baseball's first
professional club. Not true. They weren't the first professionals;
they weren't all that clean, either. You may have heard
Cooperstown, Hoboken, or New York City called the birthplace of
baseball, but not Brooklyn. Yet Brooklyn was the home of baseball's
first fans, the first ballpark, the first statistics-and modern
pitching. Baseball was originally supposed to be played, not
watched. This changed when crowds began to show up at games in
Brooklyn in the late 1850s. We fans weren't invited to the party;
we crashed it. Professionalism wasn't part of the plan either, but
when an 1858 Brooklyn versus New York City series accidentally
proved that people would pay to see a game, the writing was on the
outfield wall. When the first professional league was formed in
1871, baseball was already a fully formed modern sport with
championships, media coverage, and famous stars. Professional
baseball invented an organization, but not the sport itself.
Baseball's amazing amateurs had already done that. Thomas W.
Gilbert's history is for baseball fans and anyone fascinating by
history, American culture, and how great things began.
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