Now available in paperback, the "fresh and fascinating" (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), "splendid and brilliant" (Philadelphia Daily News) history of the early game by the Official Historian of Major League Baseball.

Who really invented baseball? Forget Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown and Alexander Cartwright. Meet Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and other fascinating figures buried beneath the falsehoods that have accrued around baseball's origins. This is the true story of how organized baseball started, how gambling shaped the game from its earliest days, and...

A project of SABR's Nineteenth Century Committee, INVENTING BASEBALL brings to life the greatest games to be played in the game's early years. From the "prisoner of war" game that took place among captive Union soldiers during the Civil War, to the first intercollegiate game (Amherst versus Williams), to the first professional no-hitter, the games in this volume span 1833-1900 and detail the athletic exploits of such players as Cap Anson, Moses "Fleetwood" Walker, Charlie Comiskey, Mike "King" Kelly, and John Montgomery Ward. 42 SABR members contributed chapters to the effort, including Bill...

Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr. (1820 92) was present during the organization of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York in the mid-1800s. That much is certain. Since that time, Cartwright has been celebrated as the founder of our national pastime, much like Abner Doubleday. As with Doubleday, however, Cartwright s claim to fame has also spawned all sorts of conjecture and controversy. His complex life, not just the mythography surrounding him, comes clearly into focus in Monica Nucciarone s biography of the incomparable Cartwright.
Nucciarone traces Cartwright s path from Elysian Fields...

Long before Moneyball became a sensation or Nate Silver turned the knowledge he'd honed on baseball into electoral gold, John Thorn and Pete Palmer were using statistics to shake the foundations of the game. First published in 1984, The Hidden Game of Baseball ushered in the sabermetric revolution by demonstrating that we were thinking about baseball stats--and thus the game itself--all wrong. Instead of praising sluggers for gaudy RBI totals or pitchers for wins, Thorn and Palmer argued in favor of more subtle measurements that correlated much more closely to the ultimate goal:...

Back in 1982, the Society for American Baseball Research was still young, barely a decade past its founding, and had grown to some 1600 members. One of their number, a "defrocked English Lit guy poking around in journalism," suggested to the board of directors that SABR, and the world, might benefit from a publication along the lines of American Heritage, only about baseball. Before long that member, John Thorn, found himself at the helm of the newly christened periodical, The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History. The very first issue included names we think of today as luminaries...

Base Ball is a peer-reviewed journal published annually. Offering the best in original research and analysis, the journal promotes study of baseball's early history, from its protoball roots to 1920, and its rise to prominence within American popular culture.