How Baseball Happened
Outrageous Lies Exposed! The True Story Revealed
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- 22,99 лв.
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- 22,99 лв.
Publisher Description
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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Baseball’s beginnings have always been pretty hazy, but Thomas W. Gilbert brings some amazing clarity to that early history with this fascinating book. Gilbert wades into the world of 19th-century amateur ball, where the game began its stunning rise as pervasive professional sport. Part of the fun of this story is the sketchy facts Gilbert has to work with. (He readily admits there are some things we just don’t know!) What he does uncover about teams like the New York Knickerbockers and Cincinnati Red Stockings makes for a grand story of boasts and half truths, with gambling always at the centre. Gilbert pushes the narrative toward two shifts in baseball we never knew were so important: the moment the public started paying to watch games and the point when players began getting paid to play. Full of both admiration and exasperation, How Baseball Happened explores America’s national pastime as a fascinating tale of grit, graft, and ingenuity.
