How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed! The True Story Revealed

by Thomas W. Gilbert, John Thorn (Introduction)

Overview

The untold story of baseball's nineteenth-century origins: "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).
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. Perhaps you've read that baseball's color line was first crossed by Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope.
Baseball's true founders don't have plaques in Cooperstown. They were hundreds of uncredited, ordinary people who played without gloves, facemasks, or performance incentives. 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.
In this myth-busting history, Thomas W. Gilbert reveals the true beginnings of baseball. Through newspaper accounts, diaries, and other accounts, he explains how it evolved through the mid-nineteenth century into a modern sport of championships, media coverage, and famous stars—all before the first professional league was formed in 1871.
Winner of the Casey Award: Best Baseball Book of the Year

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781567926880
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	08/27/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	276
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Thomas W. Gilbert is the author of many baseball books, including Baseball and the Color Line, Roberto Clemente and Playing First. From his Greenpoint, Brooklyn stoop he can throw a baseball to the former site of the Manor House tavern, where members of the Eckford Baseball Club enjoyed a post game drink or two in the 1850s.

John Thorn is the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball and the author of numerous books including Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game and Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball.

Table of Contents

Introduction by John Thorn
Amateur Era Timeline
Chapter One: The Wrongness of Baseball History
Chapter Two: Wasps in the Attic
Chapter Three: Escape from the City
Chapter Four: What Makes a River
Chapter Five: It Happened in Brooklyn
Chapter Six: A Ballplayer's Tale
Chapter Seven: Philadelphia Stories
Chapter Eight: Amateur Hour
Chapter Nine: Traveling Team
Afterword
Appendix 1: Game Versus Sport
Appendix 2: What happened to . . .
Bibliography
Photo Credits, Notes
Index

Interviews

Baseball had no single inventor or father. The so-called Abner Doubleday myth was made up 113 years ago for reasons that nobody today understands. Before that, baseball had a different origin story, that the game was invented by Alexander Cartwright and the Knickerbockers, but that story isn’t true either.

Baseball’s stories about where it came from are not merely wrong, they are knowingly and deliberately wrong. Amateur baseball invented the Knickerbockers story; professional baseball invented Abner Doubleday. As different as they are, they have the same purpose, to help market baseball as a national sport.

The truth is that the sport of baseball has hundreds of fathers. Most were part-time amateur athletes who lived in eastern cities during the 1850s and 1860s. Until the very end of that period they played for the joy of it, without gloves, facemasks or performance incentives. Unlike today’s professional players, they had full lives outside of sports. The men who gave us our national pastime were hard at work building, shaping and defending a fragile young nation. They founded businesses and industries, practiced professions, ran for office, created great railroad networks, published newspapers and fought the Civil War. They also brought baseball to the mid-west, south and west. If you want to understand how baseball really happened, you have to get to know them.

These early baseball men include the fussy and social climbing New York Knickerbockers of the 1840s and 1850s, who lent baseball their respectability but also helped make sure that African Americans were excluded. Publisher Thomas Fitzgerald, baseball’s man in Philadelphia and a friend of Abraham Lincoln, pushed back hard against racism in baseball. Nativist, poet and journalist Walt Whitman praised baseball for its physicality and fraternity — and because it was made in America. In 1860 Brooklyn public health reformer and physical fitness advocate Dr. Joseph B. Jones took his exciting Excelsiors club on the road to showcase what was then called the “New York game” to the rest of the country. Both Jones and Fitzgerald were allies of contemporary feminists, who encouraged girls and women to exercise and play sports. In Boston, the same teenagers who created American football founded one of the city’s first baseball clubs. Brooklyn Excelsiors star James Creighton invented fast, modern pitching, which led to the introduction of the strike zone in the 1860s. He was also the first pitcher to destroy his body from overwork. The full story is actually worse than that.

Baseball’s original goal was to become a popular participant sport, not an entertainment business. That changed when, to everyone’s surprise, crowds began to show up at baseball games in Brooklyn in the late 1850s. We fans weren’t invited to the party, but we crashed it and changed everything. Professionalism was not part of the plan either, but when an 1858 all-star series between the rival cities of Brooklyn and New York City accidentally proved that thousands of people would pay to watch a baseball game, the writing was on the outfield wall.

The openly paid 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings travelled coast to coast while extending their famous 84-game undefeated streak. They have been credited by history with being the first baseball professionals, who ushered in an era of clean, corporate baseball. In fact, they were neither the first professional club nor, if you know the real story, entirely clean.

Almost none of baseball’s amateur fathers can be found in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The main reason is that the modern major leagues have never been very interested in other kinds of baseball. In 1871, the first professional baseball league was formed. But baseball was already a fully formed sport; it had nationally famous stars, paying fans, media coverage, statistics, ballparks and championships. The professional leagues invented themselves, but they did not invent the sport of baseball. Baseball’s amazing amateurs had already done that.

Preface

To those who care about the past, great institutions may be of most interest when they begin. Why? Because in their sparse fields and green shoots may be seen essential attributes less visible when the endeavor is in full flower. How did photographs come to be, or movies or automobiles or computers? All origins stories fascinate.

In baseball, why nine innings, nine men, and ninety feet? Why a bat and ball and, later, a glove? Why are the bases set in a circle? Indeed, why baseball—as a game, then a sport, then an emblem for the nation in which it was formed if not truly born? To the fan of today the answers seem so obvious as to require no explanation, yet to historians of the game they have been, until quite recently, enduring mysteries. In the 1840s and 1850s, the reasons for the rise of baseball would have been first, the novelty and excitement of play, an unseemly activity for grown men; second, the opportunity for urbanites to exercise amid fresh air in a sylvan setting; and third, the assertion of a binding national identity, independent of John Bull and his national game of cricket. As America entered the 1860s and was nearly torn asunder, other reasons emerged as to how baseball happened, and why.

About ten years ago, when I was completing my own book on the early game, I was asked at a cocktail party, “What, after all your years of research, remains the great unanswered question in baseball?”

With no forethought and yet not skipping a beat, I offered, “What is it that is so satisfying about a game of catch?”

In my eighth decade I am a bit closer to an answer, I suspect. The simple idea of “to and fro” suffices to explain all that was once complex.

I still follow baseball every day, watching more than a hundred games each season. Baseball may be the one thing that I have cared about unceasingly since I was five. In my earlier work I went forward, advancing analytic notions of how the game might be improved, or at least measured more realistically. I began to wonder about what might really be going on, hidden from sight yet discernible from the game’s statistical residue. More recently I have looked back, to a time a century and more before my birth, to provide a firmer grasp of baseball’s serpentine story and the lies and legends that have attached to it. The pleasure I take in baseball games today is enriched by a knowledge of distant games and long-dead players no less vivid for their seeming invisibility.

I attended my first games at the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, and my worship of baseball heroes—first on cardboard, then on television, and at last at the ballpark—began with Duke Snider and Jackie Robinson. Today my favorites—a grownup may not be permitted heroes, right?—are the players and innovators whose stories are fascinating because what they did, they did first: Doc Adams, George Wright, Al Reach, King Kelly … oh, I could go on.

Why baseball? One may approach the question philosophically, socially, culturally, and of course historically. Tom Gilbert looks “not in box scores, in game accounts or in baseball rules changes—and certainly not in baseball’s own ridiculous creation tales—but instead in larger cultural, economic and social trends and in the whole lives and times of the men who played, promoted and wrote about the game.” In his splendidly created necropolis he summons the ghosts of Jim Creighton and Joe Start and other ancient worthies to cavort once more.

When journalists become historians—a path often taken—they retain the useful guidelines of their former craft: who, what, where, when, and how. In their invaluable works, Robert Henderson and David Block addressed the origins of bat and ball games (the where and when) around the world. My own Baseball in the Garden of Eden moved from Europe and Africa to America and addressed the what, i.e, the facts surrounding the game’s beginnings rather what self-anointed fathers of the game wished us to believe. Gilbert addresses how baseball happened and, delightfully, its anagram of who.

For him—and for me; I have been convinced—the game may have been “invented” elsewhere but, like a certain tree, it grew in Brooklyn. People made this game grow, amid a swirl of larger cultural, economic and social trends, and he tells their stories brilliantly.

What had begun as a field sport in the 1830s, a sort of outdoor gymnastics precipitated by an embrace of muscularity and a fear of cyclically recurring cholera, became an enterprise and cultural phenomenon. The need for playing grounds prompted New York baseballists to leave Manhattan for the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, New Jersey. The open land of Brooklyn, a separate city from New York, beckoned, too. Grassy fields were enclosed and flooded, to become rinks for skating, a craze predating the onset of baseball.

By the 1860s shrewd promoters took advantage of the spring thaw to create baseball fields for paid admission. Money came in, simultaneously corrupting and condemning the amateur game and stimulating the professional one that followed. Entrepreneurs, journalists, and gamblers made a buck off it, and many spectators placed their wagers at the game or took part in betting pools. But the outcome that could not have been foreseen was the emergence of a fan base, attached to a particular locality and club simply for the reflected glory of belonging, apart from any pecuniary interest. People would pay simply to watch young men vie for honors.

How Baseball Happened is a brilliant new approach to our game and its author tells a hundred stories you haven’t heard before. It is my honor to invite you to enter into his world.

How is baseball history to be written henceforth? Like this.

John Thorn
Official Historian,
Major League Baseball

Editorial Reviews

WINNER OF THE CASEY AWARD: BEST BASEBALL BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Explores the conditions and factors that begat the game in the 19th century and turned it into the national pastime. The book explains how almost all conventional wisdom about baseball’s origins and formative years is wrong. A delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Best gift book of the year! Gilbert digs deep into baseball history to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the origins of the American pastime. He contends that neither Abner Doubleday, Alexander Cartwright nor Henry Chadwick fathered the game but rather it was originated by a group of amateurs in New York City.”
—New York Post

“Baseball has fabricated its own history several times over, but its origin story matters. In this entertaining narrative, Gilbert shows how the game was developed by amateurs, in part to introduce healthier habits and the sporting life in a country that didn't really have either.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Brilliantly gathers hidden treasure long buried in newspaper accounts and diaries to present a rich and nuanced picture of American baseball as it grew and blossomed. Along the way, he explodes myths that have long shaped our understanding of this great game. This is a tart and funny trip through the raucous and aspiring culture that shaped baseball, with its volunteer firefighters, urban professionals, bloodstained butchers, and brawling gamblers.”
—Edward Achorn, author of Every Drop of Blood: The Summer of Beer and Whiskey and Fifty-nine in ’84

“A lively and often funny account of how baseball became THE national sport. At once irreverent and loving, Gilbert explodes baseball's founding myths while painting a rich portrait of a forgotten America. For baseball lovers and history buffs alike.”
—Robert Kagan, author of The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World

“A brilliant new approach to our game and its author tells a hundred stories you haven’t heard before.”
—John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball

From the Publisher