THE MAN WHO INVENTED BASEBALL

by Harold Peterson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1973

Alexander Cartwright was robbed. Robbed of his rightful immortality in the annals of sports as the true founder of America's once favorite game, baseball. You, naive reader, were probably under the impression that the game was invented by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York, today the site of the Hall of Fame. Wrong. Putting a backhand spin on his revisionist thesis re the origins of the national pastime Peterson traces the game back, back, back. . . first to the green slopes of Manhattan in 1845 when Cartwright and his chums who called themselves the Knickerbockers evolved the present-day variant with its ""cool ratiocination"" -- 90' base lines and uniquely situated shortstop. Then way back to 1621 when Governor Bradford of the Plymouth colony chastised the Puritans for indulging in a game very like baseball on the Sabbath. Finally, and almost unbelievably, back to The Doomsday Book compiled in England in 1086 by William the Conqueror. Variations on the bat-ball theme turn out to be endless from the English rounders to the German niggelschlagen to the Rumanian zurka and Peterson's attempts to disentangle the game's complicated and cosmopolitan genealogy are worthy of a Harvard researcher compiling his Ph.D. notes. You may feel that some of his cross-cultural extrapolations are somewhat fanciful and speculative but you'll admire him for running out even the most dinky pop foul before returning to Cartwright and his early innings in straw hat and blue pantaloons. For those boys of summer and all who enjoy digging about in the early history of American pop culture.

Pub Date: April 1, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribners

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION