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Summary
Summary
Think you know how the game of baseball began? Think again.
Forget Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. Forget Alexander Joy Cartwright and the New York Knickerbockers. Instead, meet Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and Louis Fenn Wadsworth, each of whom has a stronger claim to baseball paternity than Doubleday or Cartwright.
But 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, not only the Doubleday legend, so long recognized with a wink and a nudge. From its earliest days baseball was a vehicle for gambling (much like cricket, a far more popular game in early America), a proxy form of class warfare, infused with racism as was the larger society, invigorated if ultimately corrupted by gamblers, hustlers, and shady entrepreneurs. 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. And he charts the rise of secret professionalism and the origin of the notorious "reserve clause," essential innovations for gamblers and capitalists. No matter how much you know about the history of baseball, you will find something new in every chapter. Thorn also introduces us to a host of early baseball stars who helped to drive the tremendous popularity and growth of the game in the post--Civil War era: Jim Creighton, perhaps the first true professional player; Candy Cummings, the pitcher who claimed to have invented the curveball; Albert Spalding, the ballplayer who would grow rich from the game and shape its creation myth; Hall of Fame brothers George and Harry Wright; Cap Anson, the first man to record three thousand hits and a virulent racist; and many others. Add bluff, bluster, and bravado, and toss in an illicit romance, an unknown son, a lost ball club, an epidemic scare, and you have a baseball detective story like none ever written.
Thorn shows how a small religious cult became instrumental in the commission that was established to determine the origins of the game and why the selection of Abner Doubleday as baseball's father was as strangely logical as it was patently absurd. Entertaining from the first page to the last, Baseball in the Garden of Eden is a tale of good and evil, and the snake proves the most interesting character. It is full of heroes, scoundrels, and dupes; it contains more scandal by far than the 1919 Black Sox World Series fix. More than a history of the game, Baseball in the Garden of Eden 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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"It is said in folklore circles that when a custom is too old for its origins to be remembered, a story is often devised to rationalize what would otherwise be baffling," writes noted baseball historian Thorn (Total Baseball). "Such has been the case with baseball." Thorn strives to set the record straight. Among his innumerable revelations are that gambling actually legitimized the game, and that baseball's presence in America dates back to at least 1791 in Pittsfield, Mass. Long believed to be the founding fathers of baseball, Alexander Joy Cartwright and Abner Doubleday were the tools of "those who wanted to establish baseball as the product of an identifiable spark of American ingenuity." Thorn has done an admirable job in uncovering the truths and fossils of baseball's foggy prehistoric era, but the book is so dense with key figures and historical minutiae (the book spans from ancient Egypt to the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939) that it becomes plodding. With the help of an index and a highlighter, baseball lovers will savor the book as reference material. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A prominent baseball historian's delightfully literate take on the mythmakers who shaped the story of the game's creation.A glittering 1889 banquet at Delmonico'sTeddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain attendedwelcomed home Albert Goodwill Spalding's baseball team from a world tour. A rousing speech by baseball executive A.G. Mills, insisting on the game's exclusive American provenance, drew table-thumping cries of "No rounders!" This patriotic desire to claim baseball for our own, to distance it particularly from any British influence (rounders or cricket), led eventually to the appointment in 1905 of the Special Baseball Commission, charged with establishing once and for all the game's true origins. The stacked Commission settled on Civil War hero Abner Doubleday as the inventor and Cooperstown, N.Y., as the garden from which the game sprang. As scholars and sophisticated fans have long known, and as sabermetrics pioneer Thorn (editor:New York 400: A Visual History of America's Greatest City with Images from the Museum of the City of New York, 2009, etc.) meticulously demonstrates, the Commission was spectacularly wrong: The game surely pre-dated Doubleday and, in fact, had many fathers and a variety of evolutionary strands before knitting itself into the baseball we recognize today. The author autopsies the game's short-lived, prelapsarian era before moving to the time when codification of rules made baseball attractive as a spectator event, a business and a perfect vehicle for gambling. He charts the cheating, gambling, drugs (only alcohol then), color bans and the host of other sins already a part of the game's history before the Commission ever convened. Thorn expertly sifts the mix of high and low motives accounting for the anointment of Doubleday and Cooperstown, resuscitates names and teams vastly more important to the game's origins and cheerfully limns a parade of Gilded Age entrepreneurs, hucksters, journalists and promoters, whose charming fantasy of baseball's ancestry persists in the popular mind.A singular treat for baseball fans.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The eyes of even the keenest baseball fans will likely glaze over from the arcana constituting this history of baseball, from the 1820s into the early twentieth century, but Thorn's credentials as coauthor of the groundbreaking The Hidden Game of Baseball (1984) and advisor to Ken Burns' Baseball series and other high-profile achievements make it deserving of serious attention. First, Thorn adds to the modernist debunking of baseball's invention by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, while pushing forward the names of four of its likeliest American pioneers. There's also great material on the game's earthier origins his depiction of bookies roaming foul territory, pasteboards in hand, adjusting the odds inning by inning and taking bets, is indelible and on the formation of leagues, unionizing of players, and the savvy promotion of the game to mythic status. Not a leisurely read, but one that pays dividends for the effort.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AMONG the many books that have educated us about the birth and infancy of baseball, John Thorn's extraordinarily detailed and well-documented "Baseball in the Garden of Eden" is the advanced seminar, the one that begins by telling you that everything you thought you knew is wrong. Its premise is that when it comes to baseball, what is generally thought to be history is myth, and the two most prominent myths - the one that Abner Doubleday invented the game in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839, and the other that the responsible party was a New Yorker, Alexander Cartwright, who formalized the game's rules in 1845 - were promulgated by men with ulterior motives. Actually, not much of that is news. That there were stick-and-ball games in ancient Egypt and that baseball was not invented but evolved from a variety of games played in England and early America has been understood for some time. But Thorn, who was recently named the official historian of Major League Baseball, has used the myth-debunking framework to paint a more thoroughgoing picture of 19th-century baseball than has been presented before, and to offer plausible theories about why the myths prevailed in the public mind for so long. Thorn has a vexingly complicated story to tell, and one of the strengths of this book is that he shies from none of the complexities. The development of the game took place off the field as much as it did on, and Thorn scrupulously traces the influence of a variety of social forces on its progress and popularity, among them gambling, the emergence of star players and the rise of theosophy, a spiritualist movement whose adherents included Doubleday and his chief backer as the game's inventor, Albert G. Spalding. In fact, Spalding, who was a pitcher and a first baseman, the president of the Chicago White Stockings (later known as the Cubs), a baseball historian, a sportinggoods magnate and a relentless promoter of the game, rather sneakily emerges as Thorn's protagonist, the man most responsible for baseball's becoming the national pastime. Though he died in 1915, the creation of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1939, 100 years after Doubleday's supposed eureka moment, was, according to Thorn, Spalding's final achievement. "If in the end no one invented our national game, and its innocent Eden is a continuing state of delusion," Thorn writes, "he, as unwittingly as Abner Doubleday invented baseball, invented its religion and its shrine." Contemporary fans can easily forget that the game as we know it didn't emerge whole, like a chick from an egg. Called strikes didn't exist until 1858; called balls came into being five years later. Until the mid-1860s, a batted ball caught on one bounce was an out. Overhand pitching wasn't allowed until 1884. For many of the piecemeal improvements, Thorn goes to some lengths to straighten out the record and give credit where credit is due. For example, Cartwright, who is usually acknowledged to have established the distance between bases at 90 feet, the number of players on a side at nine and the length of a game at nine innings - it says so on his Hall of Fame plaque - did no such things. At least two of them (nine players and nine innings) are attributable to Louis Wadsworth, who played in the 1850s for the New York Knickerbockers, which had also been Cartwright 's club. Cartwright's written rules for the Knicks in 1845 are generally thought of as the game's establishing fundamentals, though as Thorn writes, considerable evidence exists that the rules were cribbed from those of even older clubs. In any case, the Cartwright rules make no mention of the number of players on a side. They declare that a game is over when one team tallies 21 aces, i.e., runs, and that the size of the field is 42 paces between home and second base and between first and third bases. It was not until 1857, Thorn writes, during a convention among organized clubs held to unify the playing rules, that Wadsworth led the opposition to those who advocated seven players and seven innings; he made the motion that resulted in the adoption of the standard we have today. Within a few years, Wadsworth more or less disappeared, one reason his contributions went unacknowledged by the likes of Spalding and the other members of a Special Base Ball Commission on the game's origins that was convened in the early 20th century. Thorn, however, finally exhumed the facts of his life: he married a wealthy widow, became a judge in New Jersey, eventually became a drunk and, after squandering a fortune, sold newspapers on the streets of Plainfield. He died in 1908, just days after A. G. Mills, the chairman of the special commission, published its finding: that Abner Doubleday was the inventor of baseball and that the game is wholly of American origin. Engaging mini-biographies of heretofore obscure figures like Wadsworth are sprinkled throughout the book, and it must be said that Thorn is a researcher of colossal diligence. The collection of sources he credits in the text - The American Sunday School Magazine of January 1830, for example - is fascinating all by itself, testifying to a truffle hound's obsession with buried clues. Indeed, as the author or co-author of many baseball books and the chief editor of "Total Baseball," the mammoth compilation of statistical and historical information about the game, now in its eighth edition, Thorn can probably lay claim to knowing more baseball minutiae than any other living human. (With that authority he has often been a source for reporters, myself included.) However, this expertise is, oddly enough, at the heart of the book's main weakness. Names, dates, places and citations so casually flood these pages that even sophisticated consumers of baseball lit will be in danger of drowning in them. And Thorn, who writes with the breezy erudition of a professor who presumes his students have done all their homework, doesn't always make it easy to keep the salient details straight. Even when he acknowledges the problem, he doesn't necessarily solve it. "Recapping the confusing claims," he writes about similar ballgames played in the Northeast in the first half of the 19 th century, "Philadelphia's version of town ball employed four bases plus a striker's point, resembled the New England game of round ball and, like the New York game, could be stripped down to a scrub game of cat ball when not enough players were present to play the preferred game. The Philadelphia game was regarded as baseball of an infant sort, yet it was simply rounders, which in England was another name for baseball. Dizzying." In addition. Thorn's myth debunking struck me as an unsatisfyingly undramatic narrative strategy. Rather than writing a chronological history or a biography of Albert Spalding (not a bad idea), he begins with the work of the Special Base Ball Commission, articulating its missteps and hypocrisies, and then flashes back to the previous 100 years or so of history to illustrate that the commission's report was a public relations triumph and the climax of decades of determined schemes by selfinterested parties like the theosophists. I don't doubt his claims, but there is something dissertation-ish about it all, the way the details, significant and not so, mount up and meld. Toward the end I found myself feeling like my Irish friend Desmond, whom I took to his first ballgame years ago, patiently and meticulously guiding him through the niceties of baseball's rules and traditions, explicating the mysteries of stolen bases, force plays and sacrifice flies as they presented themselves on the field. Des stayed with me, I thought. During the seventh-inning stretch (after I explained that), I asked him if he had any questions. Just one, he said, demonstrating how you can comprehend all the facts and remain profoundly mystified: "Is home a base?" Albert Spalding of the Boston Red Stockings. Bruce Weber, a reporter at The Times, is the author of "As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires."
Choice Review
With Thorn's study of baseball's origins in the US, the needs of fans and scholars will be thoroughly satisfied. This detailed account closes the chapter on early American baseball and its 19th-century roots, and as such is the perfect complement to David Block's Baseball before We Knew It. Recently named official historian of Major League Baseball, Thorn traces the mythology of the early game with great care, taking the narrative to the late 1930s and the founding of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, and the concomitant renaming of Cooperstown's baseball field to Doubleday Field (reportedly after the Civil War general who most Americans believed created the national pastime all by himself). Thorn deals effectively with all the traditional inaccuracies of baseball history and delivers some surprises. He is a scholar who has written a scholarly book about baseball; the book has plenty for social historians, including those who never touched a baseball or bat. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. S. Gittleman Tufts University