Baseball in the Garden of Eden The Secret History of the Early Game Books
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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.
Baseball in the Garden of Eden The Secret History of the Early Game Books
This book about the origins of baseball in the 19th century is meticulously researched. The opening chapters, about the earliest origins of the regional variants of American baseball, present material that is very difficult to find elsewhere. The ensuing chapters, about baseball's drift from an amateur physical-fitness activity to a professional spectator sport, are fascinating. And the sections on the influence of the Theosophists on baseball's historiography take the historical narrative in a surprising direction.Unfortunately, this book is very tiring to read. Chronologies overlap and double back on themselves, making it nearly impossible in some places to have a sense of historical sequence. References are made to persons and institutions long before it is explained who these persons and institutions are.
I hope that a later edition of this book will address this organizational chaos. The information contained here is essential to a historical understanding of baseball, and every serious student of the game will want to know these stories.
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Tags : Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Think you know how the game of baseball began? Think again. <P>Forget Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. Forget Alexander Joy Cartwright and the New York Knickerbockers. Instead,Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game,Simon & Schuster+,B005X4A2QA
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Baseball in the Garden of Eden The Secret History of the Early Game Books Reviews
If you are interested and/or curious about how Baseball came to be, and its early evolution to the modern game, then read this book. Although it bogs down a bit from time to time, it picks up again, so hang in there!
There is no doubt that the research on this book is top notch- Every detail you ever wanted to know about the creation of baseball is here- With that said- it took me four months to read this book- It was only possible to ingest a few pages at a time and I found it to be quite plodding-
John Thorn has marshalled a wealth of detail about a fascinating topic--the origins of the game of baseball.
Unfortunately, the book is so chaotically organized and repetitive that it makes for a tough read, betraying a light editorial hand when a firm one was urgently in order. Thorn begins with the intriguing story of baseball's false creation myth and its spawning at the hands of a cabal of Theosophists--only to drop that subject, returning to it again only in the final chapters, with a surfeit of repetition necessitated by the huge rupture in continuity.
There is a dizzying amount of zigging and zagging through a welter of detail, fact, and archival material throughout the rest of the book--much of it fascinating but an ordeal to plow through because of the seeming randomness of the sequencing.
Moreover, there are clear glitches here and there that should have been caught by a careful editorial eye. For example, on page 245, Thorn writes, "The troubled National League of 1893 was more radical, moving the pitching distance from fifty feet to fifty-five fand a half (not sixty and a half as is comonly thought; see below)." When we do "see below," we find the following, on page 246 "The pitching distance mandated for 1893 and still in force today was sixty feet six inches, as measured from the front of a slab with which the pitcher's back foor was required to reimain in contact. . . ." Thus we are left in utter confusion about a critical point of the evolution of baseball's rules--where were Thorn, the editor, and the copy editor when this book was being put together?
Again--this is vitally important material, with some flashes of able and witty exposition, but all of it is presented as a jigsaw puzzle that requires too much work on the part of the reader to make sense of. What this book needs is not just a reprint but a new edition, substantially trimmed and rewritten to create a coherent, compact narrative, shorn of the error, repetition, and divagation that mar this initial effort.
As the official historian of baseball, John Thorn is exhaustive in his research. But reading his book is exhausting. I found myself bogged down in all the minute details. As someone interested in the power of storytelling to shape and convey how we understand our world and our lives, I did find the first several chapters to be fascinating. Thorn unravels the creation of the creation myths of baseball. He reveals how and why the mythological story of Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown, footnoted by the story of Alexander Joy Cartwright and the N.Y. Knickerbockers, was promoted as the gospel truth about the origins of our national game. And this is a fascinating story. It is a story about the remarkable characters who crafted the legend in order to establish baseball as our secular religion and thereby shape the American sense of national identity in the 1900s.
Great book. This is the fourth copy I have bought as gifts for friends after I read mine and every has really enjoyed it.
John Thorn dismisses myths and accurately depicts the earliest playing of Base Ball in the 19th century (and before). Thorn is the Official Historian of major League Baseball and it is clear from a reading of this book as to why he has been chosen for this post.
John Thorn is the leader of the movement to tell the real story of baseball's complicated origins. Not only is the Doubleday story a myth, but its successor, the Alexander Cartwright and the Knickerbockers tale, has been so distorted that it is more fiction than fact. Thorn, the founding editor of the journal Base Ball, and now official MLB historian, sets the record straight, drawing together threads from a wide array of sources into a single coherent fabric about the origin of the national pastime.
This book about the origins of baseball in the 19th century is meticulously researched. The opening chapters, about the earliest origins of the regional variants of American baseball, present material that is very difficult to find elsewhere. The ensuing chapters, about baseball's drift from an amateur physical-fitness activity to a professional spectator sport, are fascinating. And the sections on the influence of the Theosophists on baseball's historiography take the historical narrative in a surprising direction.
Unfortunately, this book is very tiring to read. Chronologies overlap and double back on themselves, making it nearly impossible in some places to have a sense of historical sequence. References are made to persons and institutions long before it is explained who these persons and institutions are.
I hope that a later edition of this book will address this organizational chaos. The information contained here is essential to a historical understanding of baseball, and every serious student of the game will want to know these stories.
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