Description:
Imagine opening a Tut's Tomb to baseball's ancient past. That's the operative metaphor for stepping into Alfred H. Spink's 1911 volume, The National Game, meticulously resurrected in facsimile form by Southern Illinois University's superb "Writing Baseball" series. Some of the artifacts it yields are simply stunning. The founder of the venerable Sporting News, Spink set out at the beginning of the 20th century to write the game's first definitive "faithful and accurate" history and encyclopedia. He envisioned that his enormous accomplishment--published in 1910 and revised a year later--would be updated annually; instead, despite initial success, it virtually disappeared. Yet it remains a remarkably comprehensive treasure trove of records, statistics, early anecdotes, game reports, portraits, action photos, and short, though comprehensive, biographies of hundreds of players, executives, even sportswriters. Covering the bases, Spink includes tutorials on playing each position and how to keep score, and a brief list of the post-diamond careers of some notable old players: Hall of Fame pitcher Tim Keefe became a drummer, former batting champ Tip O'Neil could be found "lumbering" in Canada, and Billy Sunday, of course, turned into a fiery evangelist. In a report on former players who'd entered public life, Spink recalls that Lincoln, in the midst of a sandlot game in 1860, refused to meet with the delegation sent to inform him of his presidential nomination until he'd had another at-bat. The outcome of that at-bat--and its possible impact on the course of the republic--goes sadly unchronicled. About the only other bit absent from The National Game is praise for Abner Doubleday. The then-recent claim that Doubleday had invented the national pastime in Cooperstown in 1839 was so preposterous to Spink--he actually traces the game back nine years earlier--that he dismisses Doubleday and the Cooperstown myth in about the space it would take to mark an error on a scorecard. It would take Spink's rival, Albert G. Spalding, the Barnum of early baseball, to resurrect the canard in his version of baseball history--America's National Game--published a year later. --Jeff Silverman
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