David Block

Baseball before We Knew It (eBook, PDF)

A Search for the Roots of the Game

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

It may be America's game, but no one seems to know how or when baseball really started. Theories abound, myths proliferate, but reliable information has been in short supply-until now, when Baseball before We Knew It brings fresh new evidence of baseball's origins into play. David Block looks into the early history of the game and of the 150-year-old debate about its beginnings. He tackles one stubborn misconception after another, debunking the enduring belief that baseball descended from the English game of rounders and revealing a surprising new explanation for the most notorious myth of all-the Abner Doubleday-Cooperstown story. Block's book takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the centuries in search of clues to the evolution of our modern National Pastime. Among his startling discoveries is a set of long-forgotten baseball rules from the 1700s. Block evaluates the originality and historical significance of the Knickerbocker rules of 1845, revisits European studies on the ancestry of baseball which indicate that the game dates back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and assembles a detailed history of games and pastimes from the Middle Ages onward that contributed to baseball's development. In its thoroughness and reach, and its extensive descriptive bibliography of early baseball sources, this book is a unique and invaluable resource-a comprehensive, reliable, and readable account of baseball before it was America's game. Purchase the audio edition.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bison Books
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. März 2005
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780803204775
• Artikelnr.: 55972032

Autorenporträt

David Block is a long-time collector of early baseball books and memorabilia, and is a passionate, lifelong fan of the game and its history.

Inhaltsangabe

List of Illustrations
Foreword to the New Edition by John Thorn
Foreword by Tim Wiles
Preface to the New Edition
Preface
Acknowledgments for the New Edition
Acknowledgments
Base, as in Baseball
A Pocket(book)ful of Miracles
1. Uncertainty as to the Paternity
2. Rounders, Schmounders
3. Abner and Albert, the Missing Link by Philip Block
Playing Ball at Camp Doubleday
4. Was Abner Graves Telling the Truth?
5. Rules of Baseball: The Prequel
6. How Slick Were the Knicks?
7. In the Beginning
8. Stools, Clubs, Stobs, and Jugs
9. Traps and Cats
10. It’s Starting to Look Familiar
11. Baseball before We Knew It
Early Baseball Bibliography: Roots of the Game in Pre–Civil War Literature
Appendix 1: Constitutions and By-Laws
Appendix 2: Some Comments on Sporting Journals of the 1850s
Appendix 3: “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball”: Baseball and
Baseball-type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early
American Republic by Thomas L. Altherr
Appendix 4: The Letters of Abner Graves
Appendix 5: Dr. Adam E. Ford’s Letter to Sporting Life
Appendix 6: Battingball Games by Per Maigaard
Appendix 7: Ten Surviving Descriptions of Baseball-like Games Written and
Published before 1845
Notes
Principal Sources Consulted
Index