How Baseball Happened

The fascinating, true, story of baseballs 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 Baseballs true founders dont 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 todays pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses and fought against the South in the Civil War. But thats 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 didnt. You have read that baseballs 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 baseballs first professional club. Not true. They werent the first professionals; they werent 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 baseballs first fans, the first ballpark, the first statisticsand 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 werent invited to the party; we crashed it. Professionalism wasnt 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 not the sport itself. Baseballs amazing amateurs had already done that. Thomas W. Gilberts history is for baseball fans and anyone fascinating by history, American culture, and how great things began.