As a guy who got a master’s degree in history — and, who as a kid in the early 1970s, used to tote The Baseball Encyclopedia around on family vacations so I had something to read in the car — there are some things I want from a book about baseball history.
First, teach me something new. Second, entertain me.
The second part sounds funny, but I mean entertain in the sense that the writer is engaging and not dry. Winded, textbook descriptions about history — baseball or otherwise — is a turnoff. After all, baseball books can be part of a thesis or dissertation, but it does not have to read like one. That is to say, dry and tedious. Brownie points for a sharp wit and/or irreverence.
That is especially true in baseball. Certainly, there are books about major events in American history, for example, that should not have the author cracking wise.
But this is baseball. So, all that reverence can go out the window, if the author chooses to do so.
Thomas W. Gilbert meets both of my criteria in his newest book, How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed! The True Story Revealed (David R. Godine; $27.95; hardback; 383 pages).
The book was published last September and won the 2020 Casey Award for best baseball book of the year. Gilbert received his award Monday night.
Thorn wrote the introduction to Gilbert’s book, suggesting that while his own book examined the “what” of baseball, Gilbert addressed how baseball happened while providing the “who” — names of pioneers that many of us have never heard of.
Gilbert digs into the beginnings of baseball, debunking the myths that have long been associated with the game. Certainly, baseball experts have gotten past the idea that Abner Doubleday invented the game in a cow pasture near Cooperstown, New York. Gilbert takes it further, noting that neither Alexander Cartwright nor Henry Chadwick can be called the father of baseball.
He notes that history can be wrong — sometimes the truth can be forgotten or misunderstood. And sometimes it is erased with lies. “When it comes to telling the story of where it came from, baseball has accomplished all three,” Gilbert writes.
Gilbert also has some great observations. Early in his work, he notes that he does not care much about the history of baseball as a children’s pastime, although baseball history itself is a legitimate topic to research. The game becoming a sport is what caught his eye.
“If that had never happened, then baseball would be hopscotch,” Gilbert writes.
Gilbert suggests that the rise of the social middle class during the mid-19th century was crucial to the spread of baseball in the United States. He calls it the “Emerging Urban Bourgeoisie,” or EUB (“my ugly acronym,” he jokes). This was a group of businessmen involved in industries like railroads, mass-market publishing and even the telegraph.
While it may seem provincial on Gilbert’s part — he lives in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn — there is merit to his assertion that groups of amateurs in Manhattan and Brooklyn built the game. These amateurs joined the military and volunteer fire companies to form the “holy trinity” of U.S. urban culture before the Civil War.
“Where is the real birthplace of baseball,” Gilbert asks. “If you open up five history books, you will find at least four answers to this question.”
Cooperstown, Hoboken, New York City and even England are the stock answers. But Gilbert says it was Brooklyn.
“Humor me,” he writes.
And then Gilbert lays out his case. It’s a compelling one.
Gilbert adds that the Knickerbockers of New York, a group of white American Protestants who began playing the game in the 1840s, never claimed to invent the game. Rather, they hedged and called themselves pioneers.
The graphics in How Baseball Happened are insightful. On pages 230-231, Gilbert offers a map of “How Baseball Expanded.” Starting from New York, Gilbert provides a timeline showing how before the Civil War, baseball clubs had sprouted as far south as New Orleans and as far west as San Francisco. Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Boston and even Hamilton, Ontario, were playing the New York game.
That is because businessmen from New York fanned out and traveled to these cities, spreading the gospel of baseball while trying to make a buck.
That meant the game was established before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in 1861.
And if you believe in myths, Abner Doubleday was part of the battery that fired the first shots of the Civil War from Fort Sumter. Abner got around, apparently.
There is plenty of baseball in this book. For example, Gilbert writes about James Creighton, the first rock star pitcher in baseball history who died at age 21 from “strangulation of the intestine.”
“His career was like a nuclear explosion,” Gilbert writes. “It didn’t last long, but afterward the world was never the same.”
Creighton’s pitching style led to the formation of the strike zone, and he transformed the pitcher “into the most important defensive position.”
He also threw more than 200 pitches a game, and sometimes even 300, which is mind-boggling now.
John Creighton, James’ brother, meanwhile, fought during the Civil War and was part of a plot to colonize Nicaragua as a slave state. That did not work, and John eventually became an abolitionist. He later committed suicide.
Two very interesting characters in a book of many.
But what makes How Baseball Happened so enjoyable is how Gilbert peppers his narrative with brief vignettes. Baseball fans love trivia and history, and Gilbert provides some tasty bites that put the era into proper context. There is the story of Joseph Jones, who advocated physical education for boys and girls and touted the Excelsiors of Brooklyn to promote baseball nationally as a participant sport.
Or John Chapman, whose acrobatic barehanded catches earned him the nickname, “Death to Flying Things.”
The legendary Green-Wood Cemetery of Brooklyn, Gilbert writes, has “an astounding number” of baseball amateurs from the Amateur Era buried on its leafy grounds. James Creighton is buried there. So are Chadwick, Jones, Chapman, Asa Brainard and dozens of Knickerbockers and other members of Brooklyn teams.
“Drawing the Line” recounts the first instance of racial exclusion in baseball. In 1867, the National Association of Base Ball Players passed a rule barring membership to any club “composed of persons of color, or any portion of them.” The outlines of the first color line kin baseball, then, were drawn nearly two decades before Cap Anson and others reached a “gentleman’s agreement” to bar Blacks from the game.
“A Glimpse of Stocking” refers not to the Red Stockings or White Stockings teams of the late 19th century. Rather, it references the stockings worn by women and baseball players, which apparently were titillating to the general public.
“Showing more lower leg … had erotic impact, judging by photographs of 19th century prostitutes,” Gilbert writes. “Male calves also had appeal.” The San Francisco Chronicle, in an 1869 article, notes that the Red Stockings’ tight red wool stockings that “showed their calves in all their magnitude and rotundity.”
A century later, Jim Bouton wrote about baseball socks in Ball Four.
“It has become the fashion … to have long, long stirrups, with a lot of white showing,” he wrote. “The higher your stirrups, the cooler you look. Your legs look long and cool instead of dumpy and hot.”
Some things never change.
Gilbert has a delightful way with words that can alternate between cheeky and snarky. “The Civil War caused about 1.5 million casualties,” he begins seriously before shifting gears. “One of them was cricket.”
Gilbert adds that it is unclear why the war affected cricket, “but we do know the reason why we don’t know the reason — the chaos of war.”
The NABBP legalized professional baseball for the 1869 season, legitimizing what had been done anyway. That was the year of the Cincinnati Red Stockings and their long undefeated run. The National Association was organized in 1871, with the National League supplanting it in 1876. Baseball as we know it had finally arrived.
Gilbert’s research is drawn from 90 books and 25 online databases, Two of those books are his own — 1995’s Baseball and the Color Line, and 2015’s Playing First: Early Baseball Lives at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. He is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and maintains a blog on Goodreads.
How Baseball Began allows fans to view the origins of the game from a fresh angle. Gilbert opens a window into a world of American nativism, when crediting the origins of baseball to British games like cricket and rounders was considered bad form for a country still trying to escape its colonialism from a century before.'''
There are new and fascinating characters to read about, and whether or not one believes that baseball as we know it grew in Brooklyn, it is an interesting idea.