Baseball In The Garden Of Eden

Download or read book Baseball in the Garden of Eden written by John Thorn and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think you know how the game of baseball began? Think again. Forget Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. Did baseball even have a father--or did it just evolve from other bat-and-ball games? John Thorn, baseball's preeminent historian, examines the creation story of the game and finds it all to be a gigantic lie. From its earliest days baseball was a vehicle for gambling, a proxy form of class warfare. Thorn traces the rise of the New York version of the game over other variations popular in Massachusetts and Philadelphia. He shows how the sport's increasing popularity in the early decades of the nineteenth century mirrored the migration of young men from farms and small towns to cities, especially New York. Full of heroes, scoundrels, and dupes, this book tells the story of nineteenth-century America, a land of opportunity and limitation, of glory and greed--all present in the wondrous alloy that is our nation and its pastime.--From publisher description.

Download or read book Baseball Before We Knew It written by David Block and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It may be America?s game, but no one seems to know how or when baseball really started. Theories abound, myths proliferate, but reliable information has been in short supply?until now, when Baseball before We Knew It brings fresh new evidence of baseball?s origins into play. David Block looks into the early history of the game and of the 150-year-old debate about its beginnings. He tackles one stubborn misconception after another, debunking the enduring belief that baseball descended from the English game of rounders and revealing a surprising new explanation for the most notorious myth of all?the Abner Doubleday?Cooperstown story. ø Block?s book takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the centuries in search of clues to the evolution of our modern National Pastime. Among his startling discoveries is a set of long-forgotten baseball rules from the 1700s. Block evaluates the originality and historical significance of the Knickerbocker rules of 1845, revisits European studies on the ancestry of baseball which indicate that the game dates back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and assembles a detailed history of games and pastimes from the Middle Ages onward that contributed to baseball?s development. In its thoroughness and reach, and its extensive descriptive bibliography of early baseball sources, this book is a unique and invaluable resource?a comprehensive, reliable, and readable account of baseball before it was America?s game.

Download or read book How Baseball Happened written by Thomas W. Gilbert and published by Godine+ORM. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Baseball in Blue and Gray written by George B. Kirsch and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Civil War, Americans from homefront to battlefront played baseball as never before. While soldiers slaughtered each other over the country's fate, players and fans struggled over the form of the national pastime. George Kirsch gives us a color commentary of the growth and transformation of baseball during the Civil War. He shows that the game was a vital part of the lives of many a soldier and civilian--and that baseball's popularity had everything to do with surging American nationalism. By 1860, baseball was poised to emerge as the American sport. Clubs in northeastern and a few southern cities played various forms of the game. Newspapers published statistics, and governing bodies set rules. But the Civil War years proved crucial in securing the game's place in the American heart. Soldiers with bats in their rucksacks spread baseball to training camps, war prisons, and even front lines. As nationalist fervor heightened, baseball became patriotic. Fans honored it with the title of national pastime. War metaphors were commonplace in sports reporting, and charity games were scheduled. Decades later, Union general Abner Doubleday would be credited (wrongly) with baseball's invention. The Civil War period also saw key developments in the sport itself, including the spread of the New York-style of play, the advent of revised pitching rules, and the growth of commercialism. Kirsch recounts vivid stories of great players and describes soldiers playing ball to relieve boredom. He introduces entrepreneurs who preached the gospel of baseball, boosted female attendance, and found new ways to make money. We witness bitterly contested championships that enthralled whole cities. We watch African Americans embracing baseball despite official exclusion. And we see legends spring from the pens of early sportswriters. Rich with anecdotes and surprising facts, this narrative of baseball's coming-of-age reveals the remarkable extent to which America's national pastime is bound up with the country's defining event.

Download or read book Our Team written by Luke Epplin and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting story of four men—Larry Doby, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paige—whose improbable union on the Cleveland Indians in the late 1940s would shape the immediate postwar era of Major League Baseball and beyond. In July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar sparked one of the wildest and most meaningful seasons in baseball history. In intimate, absorbing detail, Luke Epplin's Our Team traces the story of the integration of the Cleveland Indians and their quest for a World Series title through four key participants: Bill Veeck, an eccentric and visionary owner adept at exploding fireworks on and off the field; Larry Doby, a soft-spoken, hard-hitting pioneer whose major-league breakthrough shattered stereotypes that so much of white America held about Black ballplayers; Bob Feller, a pitching prodigy from the Iowa cornfields who set the template for the athlete as businessman; and Satchel Paige, a legendary pitcher from the Negro Leagues whose belated entry into the majors whipped baseball fans across the country into a frenzy. Together, as the backbone of a team that epitomized the postwar American spirit in all its hopes and contradictions, these four men would captivate the nation by storming to the World Series--all the while rewriting the rules of what was possible in sports.

Download or read book Base Ball Founders written by Peter Morris and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-07-15 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book completes the series of histories of the clubs and players responsible for making baseball the national pastime that began with Base Ball Pioneers, 1850-1870 (McFarland 2011). Forty clubs and hundreds of pioneer players from the first hotbeds of New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are profiled by leading experts on baseball's early years. The subjects include legendary clubs such as the Knickerbockers of New York, the Eckfords and Atlantics of Brooklyn, the Athletics of Philadelphia, and Harvard's first baseball clubs, and fabled players like Jim Creighton, Dickey Pearce, and Daniel Adams, but space is also given to less well remembered clubs such as the Champion Club of Jersey City and the Cummaquids of Barnstable, Massachusetts. What united all of these founders of the game was that their love of baseball during its earliest years helped to make it the national pastime.

Download or read book Color Blind written by Tom Dunkel and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking readers back in time to 1947, an award-winning journalist chronicles an integrated baseball team in Bismarck, North Dakota that rose above a segregated society to become champions, delving into the history of the players, the town and baseball itself.