Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search For The Roots Of The Game

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Summary: David Block Dispels Myths on Roots of Baseball
Review: David Block's elegantly written and exhaustively researched look at the roots of the game of baseball is sure to turn more than a few heads. Although baseball has been dubbed America's pastime since at least the 1860's, its history has been shamefully and erroneously recorded. Not any more! David Block has made some extraordinary discoveries, most significant that baseball was not first played in America and was not derived from the game of rounders. These myths have been a part of every schoolboys memory, and even David admits to learning the Doubleday myth in his childhood. David has also compiled the most comprehensive bibliography to date of every appearance in literature of bat and ball games from the middle ages to the Civil War, and as a reference tool this book is simply unparalleled. A must read for the baseball historian, and yet it is accessible to even the casual fan. My hat is off to David for challenging the baseball gods and pulling it off with flying colors!



Rating:
Summary: The Roots of Our National Pastime
Review: I highly recommend this very information and entertaining book about the origins, the very roots, of the game that is, as Walt Whitman said, "Our Game...America's Game". For those interested in baseball and it's history, this is simply the best book written on the topic in the last fifty years. Best yet, it is not ponderous but an easy read that the casual fan as well as the hard core historian will love. I could tell you all of the little nuggets you will learn, but, I suggest you simply go out and buy one! After all, Opening Day is just around the corner!!

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Summary: David Block Has Set New Standard For Early Baseball Research
Review: The scope and depth of Block's research is staggering. Yet, his organization and style of writing are clear and engaging. Both his research and his writing make this a great work of integrity; the integrity to delve so far and wide, the integrity to personally view each source (of which there are hundreds), the integrity to correct the mistakes of previous findings even when it subtracted support for the author's own findings, and most of all, the integrity to resist conjecture.

The book's bibliography of nearly 60 pages is in itself a book, containing hundreds of literary and other references to baseball between the years 1450 and 1861. The author not only provides informative notes on the baseball related content of the individual sources, but often makes engaging comments on the rarity, location or visual aspects of the source such as illustrations, diagrams and other characteristics of particular works.

There is even a chapter which the author, generously and wisely, included that was contributed by his brother Philip. If you think that it is enough to know that the Abner Doubleday-Inventor of Baseball is just a worn out myth, think again. This chapter sheds a whole new light on the whole affair, and gives additional insight into this portion of our National Pastime's "history."

David is more than just kind to those who's shoulders he admittingly stood upon. He not only is quick to acknowledge their pioneering work, but when his own work effectively nullifies the work of those who labored before him, he is quick to offer additional insights into how erroneous conclusions may have been reached and is just as quick to point out that his predecessors did not have the modern technological research tools available to him.

This book belongs on the shelves of a wide variety of readers; from researchers and scholars to plain old baseball fans (who are sometimes also researchers and scholars). No serious discussion or writing about the early origins of baseball for the next hundred years will omit David Block's, "Baseball before We Knew It."