Book Review-Baseball Before We Knew It

First, I'd like to apologize for my lapse in posting, work and my other sporting love-motor racing have gotten in the way of late. No excuse mind you, but I feel I need to explain myself! The 1888 Louisville Colonels retrospective is still on, but it'll be about a week before I can be fully caught up.

The last month hasn't been a total loss vintage base ball-wise, I got into some action in a couple games in Covington against the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame team and managed to hit line drives at every single player on the left side of the infield. Also, I've just about finished David Block's Baseball Before We Knew It.

This isn't a new title, as it's about 15 years old, but it's a valuable addition to any serious scholar of the game's bookshelf. This is a must-have.

Ask the average person who invented baseball and they'll most likely answer "Abner Doubleday" one day in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Alas, this isn't so. The future defender of Fort Sumter and the man who commanded the Federal forces on the field briefly on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg had a distinguished life, well-respected by his peers, but baseball inventor he ain't. He was at West Point at that time, enduring the rigors of Academy life.

Doubleday became baseball's creator at the end of a dispute between two of the giants of the early years of the sport. Sporting goods magnate and former pitcher Albert Spalding and the magisterial baseball writer, statistician and historian Henry Chadwick had a running debate between themselves for roughly 20 years as to the game's progeny.

Spalding, proud American to the core, insisted some bright young American lad invented the game. Chadwick, a British expatriate, insisted baseball developed from the British game of rounders. In the sporting press they jousted, mostly in good nature, about the evolution of baseball.

Spalding eventually established a commission to verify who invented the game, and long (long) story short, Abner Graves, essentially a superannuated Colorado crackpot wrote a ludicrously detailed letter regarding how he witnessed the Abner Doubleday invent of baseball as a young man in Cooperstown in 1839. The letter and it's information is spurious at best, but Spalding had what he needed. Doubleday became the game's founder and in the public's eye, the game had a purely American genesis.

Turns out research debunked this story. So is Chadwick right? Not exactly.

Bat and ball games go back time immemorial. David Block masterfully accounts the variety of games played with stick and ball having vestigal semblance to baseball. These games not only developed in England, but all over Europe, North America, and even Africa.

Block, as well as other researchers did masterful work in researching obscure, centuries-old sources to trace down the family tree of baseball.

English writer Jane Austen mentions baseball in Northanger Abbey, written in 1799, well in advance of Doubleday. But that's not the first reference of the game in print. Baseball, stoolball, French "poison ball" among others all have traits similar to our game.

Soldiers on both sides of the American Revolution played stick and ball games, some referenced to base. George Washington himself threw a ball around with his staff at times. Imagine, Washington and Alexander Hamilton throwing a ball around, it's a shame that didn't make it into Hamilton.

In short, baseball has a long history. It's history is still longer than what we know, not to spoil the book, I'll stop here. But, anyone who wants to know about the creation of our game needs this book. It's a must, not only for it's debunking of the Doubleday myth, but also that rounders fathered base basll entirely. The truth is always much more complex, as David Block so skillfully masters in his book Baseball Before We Knew It.