The fascinating, true, story of baseball-s 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
Baseball-s true founders don-t 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 today-s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses and fought against the South in the Civil War.
But that-s 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 pla
