How Baseball Happened

HOW BASEBALL HAPPENED

• Gilbert names Brooklyn as the likeliest true birthplace of baseball--and the rivalry with Manhattan helped baseball catch on as a spectator sport. This is something Brooklyn-New York City stores will appreciate.
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• We're in a time of sports deprivaton. There is a pent-up demand for sports--especially baseball--and all the more reason to celebrate the game this summer and fall.
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• Author Tom Gilbert is equally at home at academic conferences and in media appearances--we'll have significant bookings for him after Labor Day and before the Post-Season.
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• The controversial nature of the book, and the author's blunt style of calling out "bullstuff" is ideal for reviews to spark debate.
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• ShelfAwareness ad.
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How baseball evolved with shocking speed from a casual folk game into a serious adult activity, an instrument of national unification and then a national entertainment industry.

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...

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