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In the early years of my boyhood, we listened to Bill Stern's Sports on the radio. Although I did not hear Stern tell his most amazing story, my father often repeated it to me, and I took it to be God's truth. When Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theater in April of 1865, the mortally wounded president was taken across the street to the house in which he would soon pass away. In attendance at his bedside was General Abner Doubleday, a hero of the battle of Gettysburg. At the end of his agony, Lincoln beckoned to Doubleday, and whispered his last words into the general's ear: "Don't let baseball die." I knew that Doubleday had founded baseball in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Stern's story thus linked the two most important things about American life, the savior of the Republic and the national pastime.
Baseball Before We Knew It: |
By the time I was a knowledgeable baseball fan, the myth about Doubleday and the beginning of baseball at Cooperstown was on its last legs. The legend had justified the location of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, but everyone with even a passing knowledge of and interest in the game thought that the story was fanciful, that people had probably played baseball earlier and in other places. Baseball historians soon demonstrated these ideas with greater authority, and part of what David Block does in his curious book is to drive some last nails into the Cooperstown coffin. Baseball Before We Knew It, however, goes further and tells us how and why baseball promoters and publicists developed the tale about Doubleday and Cooperstown—they wanted to secure an American starting point for the game, and not an English one.
More important, for Block, is his challenge to the alternative accounts that have arisen since scholarship debunked the Cooperstown fable. A legion of historians has told us that in the 18th century the English played various ball games. One of these was "rounders," a game so called because the players went "round" some bases. Baseball, these historians have informed us, derives from rounders. The American game has its roots in an earlier English game that colonists transformed after they migrated to the New World.
Block argues that this story too is wrong. What really happened is that in the 1700s the English (and the French and Germans) did play a variety of games that involved upwards of two players and that used bats, balls, and bases in many different ways. One dominant set of games used bases (Block calls this set English base-ball). Both baseball and rounders came from English base-ball, but rounders developed only in England, and indeed developed later than baseball, which had an independent growth in the United States. Although the national pastime had its origins in England, rounders is not its mother but only a younger brother.
I called this book curious a couple of paragraphs back, and it is. While Block is an engaging and knowledgeable writer, the heart of Baseball Before We Knew It is an exhaustive and annotated bibliography of references to early "baseball" in a variety of books and pamphlets. There are also other lengthy odds and ends of bibliographical information. Many interesting illustrations depict these early games and accompany the bibliographies. Block uses this hard-won information in several of his chapters to make his case that American baseball is independent of rounders. Nonetheless, there is inevitably some overlap between analysis and bibliography, and considerable repetition. Moreover, the 55-page bibliography wearies even a committed reader (me).
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