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.
Once through the first chapter, Thorn settles into a largely chronological account of 19th century baseball, but not without repeated asides that often give us a glimpse into the work of the historian, such as the story of Louis Fenn Wadsworth, a New York lawyer who took up the practice of baseball and is credited by Thorn as responsible for the game’s rule of nine-men-a-side for nine innings. Wadsworth’s name featured in documents of the 1905 commission, but neither the researchers then, nor Thorn one hundred years later, had any luck documenting Wadsworth himself until a cache of old newspapers were digitized and the reason for his disappearance from the historical record discovered. On becoming a widower at the age of 58 in 1883, he fell into alcoholism, lost his wealth, and afterwards survived by selling newspapers on the street before committing himself to a home for the destitute, where he died alone and unnoticed in 1908, less than a week after the commission’s chair admitted to the untraceability of Louis Fenn Wadsworth.
Although his contributions to the game – and his fate – have now been documented, the origins of many rules and traditions have been lost. A hodgepodge of ball-and-bat games was played across North America, and many have been claimed as direct antecedents. Thorn disputes the idea that baseball grew out of rounders, insists it was influenced more significantly by cricket, and concludes that “in fact, baseball appears to have sprung up everywhere, like dandelions, and we cannot now expect to identify with certainty which of these hardy flowers was truly the first.”
Contrary to popular notions of cultural diffusion, Thorn argues that not only did baseball not trickle down from the upper to the lower classes, but asserts more generally that no such model can adequately explain the growth and spread of popular culture, which typically rises from the bottom “if it is to gather the strength needed to endure.”
...baseball was a rough and tumble game for boys, a holiday ritual for young men of the country flocking to town on July 4 or Election Day. In general, it was a fairly riotous affair marked by stinging throws to the ribs, taunts for poor performance, handsome prizes to the victors, and side bets galore. Compared to rural baseball, the chivalric courtliness that characterized early matches at Hoboken—a phoney medievalism born of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe —seemed mere pomp and mummery. Emerson termed such displays “virtue gone to seed.”
First, gambling. Adults must care about the outcome, and their willingness to place a wager is a reasonable measure of their interest. As a game matures, investors and civic boosters may pool their interests in order to absorb a greater risk, placing their bets on the protracted success of a club or a ball grounds. Second, statistics. Whether merely game scores or primitive box scores, these numerical attachments to prose accounts accord a mantle of importance to the matches, an importance like that of trade or transport or government; in addition, quantifying the game’s constituent parts further fuels the first mover of sport, gambling. Third, publicity. Regular press coverage is a necessary development to convey the enthusiasm exhibited at a single contest, however it may have been fueled, to those only reading about it afterwards, often at great distance from the event.When baseball was still Edenic, the game was organized largely along class lines as a means for inculcating habits of health, cooperation, friendly competition, and perhaps most importantly promoting class cohesion. In this pre-Civil War era, the predominant ethos remained anti-commercial, even as commercial elements began their takeover of the game. A player of the period outlined what was at stake:
How would you like to see those you depended upon to uphold the name and fame of the club bought up like cattle, or if not bought, would you like to see the bribe repeatedly offered to them, to desert their colors. These things have occurred, and it was thought best to nip them in the bud. . . . This rule was used to protect ourselves against the influence of money, and give “honest poverty” a fair chance, and in a struggle for supremacy between clubs to let skill, courage, and endurance decide who shall be the victors.As baseball attracted more interest, especially among gamblers, it was no longer enough to enjoy a day out in the air with friends. Spectators wanted to see skilled played, not just a bunch of amateurs hacking at pitches and chasing balls around a field. Teams sought to answer those expectations by attracting better performers with promises of emoluments. Financial predators, meanwhile, looked for ways to exploit this new entertainment, leading in 1858 to the first recorded instance in which spectators were charged to view a game. It is to this date that Thorn traces baseball’s expulsion from Eden. In the post-war years, commercial trends would become more assertive, finally breaking into the open in 1869 when The National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) recognized two classes of players: amateur and professional. The same year the Cincinnati Base Ball Club (otherwise known as the Red Stockings), loaded their team with high calibre players (with a combined six-month salary of $9300) and embarked on a national coast-to-coast tour from which they returned undefeated in 64 contests.
The book’s latter half recounts the numerous competing commercial interests that not only popularized baseball, but threatened as well to strangle it through greed. Along the way Thorn teases the reader with what he claims are hints that explain what was considered the ridiculous idea, even in 1908 when it was proposed, that the game was invented singlehandedly by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. In the end it was not so much a conspiracy of the principle players, Thorn proposes, as it is a confluence of events leading inexorably to wholesale creation of modern folklore. “Often the best explanation for the otherwise inexplicable is dumb luck.”
If you wish to familiarize yourself with the details, and you are not a patient reader willing to move back and forth through the text, then this is probably not the book for you. Those with an ear for 19th century prose will enjoy the many extracts from primary sources, as well as Thorn’s own writing, which has so obviously been influenced by his extensive reading of period documents. And don’t discount the opportunity to enlarge your vocabulary. It’s not often that one runs into words such as rodomontade, tinker’s malediction, or impecunious while reading baseball.
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