The Prehistory of Baseball

Among the many books that have educated us about the birth and infancy of baseball, John Thorn’s extraordinarily detailed and well-documented “Baseball in the Garden of Eden” is the advanced seminar, the one that begins by telling you that everything you thought you knew is wrong. Its premise is that when it comes to baseball, what is generally thought to be history is myth, and the two most prominent myths — the one that Abner Doubleday invented the game in Coopers­town, N.Y., in 1839, and the other that the responsible party was a New Yorker, Alexander Cartwright, who formalized the game’s rules in 1845 — were promulgated by men with ulterior motives.

Actually, not much of that is news. That there were stick-and-ball games in ancient Egypt and that baseball was not invented but evolved from a variety of games played in England and early America has been understood for some time. But Thorn, who was recently named the official historian of Major League Baseball, has used the myth-debunking framework to paint a more thoroughgoing picture of 19th-century baseball than has been presented before, and to offer plausible theories about why the myths prevailed in the public mind for so long.

Thorn has a vexingly complicated story to tell, and one of the strengths of this book is that he shies from none of the complexities. The development of the game took place off the field as much as it did on, and Thorn scrupulously traces the influence of a variety of social forces on its progress and popularity, among them gambling, the emergence of star players and the rise of theosophy, a spiritualist movement whose adherents included Doubleday and his chief backer as the game’s inventor, Albert G. Spalding.

In fact, Spalding, who was a pitcher and a first baseman, the president of the Chicago White Stockings (later known as the Cubs), a baseball historian, a sporting-goods magnate and a relentless promoter of the game, rather sneakily emerges as Thorn’s protagonist, the man most responsible for baseball’s becoming the national pastime. Though he died in 1915, the creation of the Hall of Fame in Coopers­town in 1939, 100 years after Doubleday’s supposed eureka moment, was, according to Thorn, Spalding’s final achievement.

“If in the end no one invented our national game, and its innocent Eden is a continuing state of delusion,” Thorn writes, “he, as unwittingly as Abner Doubleday invented baseball, invented its religion and its shrine.”

Contemporary fans can easily forget that the game as we know it didn’t emerge whole, like a chick from an egg. Called strikes didn’t exist until 1858; called balls came into being five years later. Until the mid-1860s, a batted ball caught on one bounce was an out. Overhand pitching wasn’t allowed until 1884. For many of the piecemeal improvements, Thorn goes to some lengths to straighten out the record and give credit where credit is due.

For example, Cartwright, who is usually acknowledged to have established the distance between bases at 90 feet, the number of players on a side at nine and the length of a game at nine innings — it says so on his Hall of Fame plaque — did no such things. At least two of them (nine players and nine innings) are attributable to Louis Wadsworth, who played in the 1850s for the New York Knickerbockers, which had also been Cartwright’s club.

Cartwright’s written rules for the Knicks in 1845 are generally thought of as the game’s establishing fundamentals, though as Thorn writes, considerable evidence exists that the rules were cribbed from those of even older clubs. In any case, the Cartwright rules make no mention of the number of players on a side. They declare that a game is over when one team tallies 21 aces, i.e., runs, and that the size of the field is 42 paces between home and second base and between first and third bases. It was not until 1857, Thorn writes, during a convention among organized clubs held to unify the playing rules, that Wadsworth led the opposition to those who advocated seven players and seven innings; he made the motion that resulted in the adoption of the standard we have today.

Within a few years, Wadsworth more or less disappeared, one reason his contributions went unacknowledged by the likes of Spalding and the other members of a Special Base Ball Commission on the game’s origins that was convened in the early 20th century. Thorn, however, finally exhumed the facts of his life: he married a wealthy widow, became a judge in New Jersey, eventually became a drunk and, after squandering a fortune, sold news­papers on the streets of Plainfield. He died in 1908, just days after A. G. Mills, the chairman of the special commission, published its finding: that Abner Doubleday was the inventor of baseball and that the game is wholly of American origin.

Engaging mini-biographies of heretofore obscure figures like Wadsworth are sprinkled throughout the book, and it must be said that Thorn is a researcher of colossal diligence. The collection of ­sources he credits in the text — The American Sunday School Magazine of January 1830, for example — is fascinating all by itself, testifying to a truffle hound’s obsession with buried clues. Indeed, as the author or co-author of many baseball books and the chief editor of “Total Baseball,” the mammoth compilation of statistical and historical information about the game, now in its eighth edition, Thorn can probably lay claim to knowing more baseball minutiae than any other living human. (With that authority he has often been a source for reporters, myself included.) However, this expertise is, oddly enough, at the heart of the book’s main weakness. Names, dates, places and citations so casually flood these pages that even sophisticated consumers of baseball lit will be in danger of drowning in them. And Thorn, who writes with the breezy erudition of a professor who presumes his students have done all their homework, doesn’t always make it easy to keep the salient details straight. Even when he acknowledges the problem, he doesn’t necessarily solve it.

“Recapping the confusing claims,” he writes about similar ballgames played in the Northeast in the first half of the 19th century, “Philadelphia’s version of town ball employed four bases plus a striker’s point, resembled the New England game of round ball and, like the New York game, could be stripped down to a scrub game of cat ball when not enough players were present to play the preferred game. The Philadelphia game was regarded as baseball of an infant sort, yet it was simply rounders, which in England was another name for baseball. Dizzying.”

In addition, Thorn’s myth debunking struck me as an unsatisfyingly undramatic narrative strategy. Rather than writing a chronological history or a biography of Albert Spalding (not a bad idea), he begins with the work of the Special Base Ball Commission, articulating its missteps and hypocrisies, and then flashes back to the previous 100 years or so of history to illustrate that the commission’s report was a public relations triumph and the climax of decades of determined schemes by self-interested parties like the theosophists.

I don’t doubt his claims, but there is something dissertation-ish about it all, the way the details, significant and not so, mount up and meld. Toward the end I found myself feeling like my Irish friend Desmond, whom I took to his first ballgame years ago, patiently and meticulously guiding him through the niceties of baseball’s rules and traditions, explicating the mysteries of stolen bases, force plays and sacrifice flies as they presented themselves on the field. Des stayed with me, I thought. During the seventh-inning stretch (after I explained that), I asked him if he had any questions. Just one, he said, demonstrating how you can comprehend all the facts and remain profoundly mystified: “Is home a base?”