(Second in a series of review of sports books)

“How Baseball Happened”

By Thomas Gilbert

Godine Publishing

There have been an awful lot of books chronicling the history of baseball. Most of them start with the beginning of the National League in 1876, or the period around the first World Series in 1903.

Gilbert goes back much further, tracing the sport’s origin to more than two centuries ago while focusing on what he refers to as the “late Amateur Era” from the mid-1850s to 1870.

The author suggests that pickup baseball games were being played “in the 1820s, in the 1800s, and even earlier.” (It was generally referred to as “base ball,” by the way, even into the 20th century.) The earliest rendition was similar to an English game called “rounders” and to cricket. Americans of the day, still fresh from a pair of wars with the British, wanted their own game.

Gilbert seems to take great pleasure in dispelling the popularized notion that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839, or that Alexander Cartwright, as a member of the New York Knickerbockers of the 1840s, wrote the sport’s first rules. The Knickerbockers and the “New York Nine,” he writes, did not play the first baseball game in 1846.

The author traces the sport’s origin to Brooklyn and writes that “the rise of the modern middle class” was vital to the sport’s spread in the decades before the Civil War. (A similar game was played in Philadelphia called “town ball,” which had fast overhand pitching. Early baseball rules called for only underhand pitching, which wasn’t changed until 1884.)

Gilbert credits the Knickerbockers with being integral to the marketing of the game to what he calls “the emerging urban bourgeoisie (EUB)” as a participant sport and an “all-American alternative to cricket.” Baseball fans of the late 1850s were “America’s first sports fans,” paying for game tickets and spawning allegiances to teams.

There is much information about such early stars such as Jim Creighton, who died in 1861 at age 22 from a strangulated intestine, ostensibly from throwing too many pitches.

Though some players were paid before then, the professional era began in 1869. Gilbert lays out the socioeconomic reasons why baseball grew in popularity when other sports didn’t, and why it was an important game even for prisoners during the Civil War.

I liked one story recounted from a prison camp in Salisbury, N.C., in 1862, with one team nursing a one-run, late-inning lead: “A long fly ball was hit toward the captain run right field, but in order to catch it and win the game, he was forced to cross the ‘deadline,’ the demarcation between the prison yard and escape. In that instant he had to decide if he would cross the line, with the very real risk of being shot, or let the ball drop harmlessly to the ground, giving advantage to the other team. He opted to make the catch because he was fairly certain the guard on duty that day would not shoot. They won the game.”

The Cincinnati Red Stockings, stocked with the first players with annual salaries, went 69-0 in 1869 and had an 84-game win streak that captivated the nation. In 1871 the National Association, baseball’s first pro league, began play. And the sport would never be the same. But really, the author writes, it changed even before that.

“Professional baseball has no real founding fathers, other than, perhaps, the thousands of anonymous spectators who came out to watch baseball games run Brooklyn in the late 1850s,” he writes. “Baseball as an entertainment business and as a profession became an inevitability when the first fans paid to see a game.”

If you like baseball history, you’ll enjoy reading this book.

Shop local. How Baseball Happened is available from Powell’s Books.

Most of my books are also available at Powell’s and make great gifts.

Readers: what are your thoughts on the history of baseball? Do you have a favorite team that you root for? Share your comments below.

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