Book review: Thorn, J. (2014). Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game.

Thorn, J. (2014). Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. 1st ed. New York: Simon & Schuster.

This is not a suitable introductory text to the origins of baseball.  Readers without the appropriate background will very quickly find themselves wading through a veritable sea of names, dates, claims and counterclaims, much of it presented out of chronological sequence, and a fair portion made of up of extensive extracts from primary documents.

The book opens at the turn of the 20th century with a commission tasked with tracing the origins of baseball.  Thorn then moves in and out of narratives, back and forth across this point in time, to examine the commission’s collected documents and determine what was overlooked, or perhaps deliberately ignored, in reaching the now debunked claims for baseball having been invented by Abner Doubleday in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York.  It’s an interesting tale, and Thorn has obviously done his research, but this is clearly a book for those who might have a stake in the story, or how it is told.  A book, in other words, for historians and researchers.

Special Instructions to Players

Almost every chapter in Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden contains a historical oddity worth a bookmark -- or a blog post.  In this case, the league's Special Instructions to Players.  Thorn sets the scene:

In the National League, [John T.] Brush tried to introduce reforms and to punish miscreants, partly from conviction and partly because he thought it made business sense. ... League attendance figures, stagnant on a per-club basis, worried him. At a league meeting in March 1898, Brush pushed through a resolution to “suppress obscene, indecent, and vulgar language on the ball field by players.” It passed unanimously, and then a shocking secret memorandum was delivered by hand to each of the twelve clubs and perhaps each league player—its obscenity made it undeliverable by ordinary mail without risk of federal prosecution—detailing precisely the language that had been complained of in the previous year.

Rooting for Laundry

Rooting for Laundry from Melel Media on Vimeo.

I'm in the midst of John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden, a wonderfully informative, entertaining and evocative book. Thorn's voice and phrasing have obviously been influenced by a lifetime reading Victorian-era sources, which he quotes liberally throughout, and he brings to his topic a breadth of knowledge that extends beyond the period, the sport, or the country.

In a discussion of the commercialization of baseball, for example, he notes one of the first occasions for what had been until then locally stocked teams taking on paid players from outside the community.  In 1869 the Cincinnati Base Ball Club hired an almost entire roster of outsiders, leaving its supporters to "root for the laundry."  The quotation is from a comment made by comedian Jerry Seinfeld about the utter emptiness of the modern professional sports team, in which players and managers regularly change from season to season, in which owners move teams from city to city, and whose only enduring feature is the uniform.

Thorn goes on to note such a phenomenon was not unknown to the ancients, quoting Pliny the Younger on the chariot races of 2000 years ago:

“If indeed it were the swiftness of the horses, or the skill of the men that attracted them, there might be some pretense for it [the passion of the crowd]. But it is the dress they like; it is the dress that takes their fancy. And if, in the midst of the course and the contest, the different parties were to change colors their different partisans would change sides and instantly desert the very same men and horses whom just before they were eagerly following. . . . Such mighty charms, such wondrous power reside in the color of a paltry tunic!”

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The provincial character of fandom

In an effort to speed up play and perhaps attract new custom, MLB management has proposed new rules for extra-inning play.  For the purpose of this discussion, the rule itself is irrelevant.  What is of interest is the reaction among aficionados.  The most commonly published view seems to be that it’s a silly idea, especially as it will affect so few games.  At least one writer, though, has argued the idea is worth trying – but not in major league games.  His argument is that such games “matter,” while minor league or amateur league games do not.  He speaks of being “invested” in major league games, and describes other contests, such as the WBC tournament or the All-Star game, as “fun” or “enjoyable,” but not contests about which one “cares.”  

What, we might ask, does he mean by being invested?  What makes one set of players in one context “matter” more than players in another?  They are both, after all, playing the same game, by (largely) the same rules. It could be proposed that US major league baseball is something of a global standard-bearer and therefore its games are of greater importance than all others, but this is really nothing more than argument from tradition.  From the earliest days of baseball’s global diffusion, teams have been fielded equal to or better in talent than US teams. I assume the investment of which the writer speaks is emotional and linked, among other things, to the time spent learning about a particular team or league, and on feelings of belonging to a collective of enthusiasts from a common locale. The investment is in identity, which could theoretically be given to any team, anywhere.  The argument seems to boil down to: Don’t change my favorite league, the one that matters to me.  

Photo:  Prince Seibu Dome, Saitama, Japan.

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