How Baseball Happened

The untold story of baseball’s nineteenth-century origins: “a delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat” (Paul Dickson, The Wall Street Journal). You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn’t. Perhaps you’ve read that baseball’s color line was first crossed by Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. Baseball’s true founders don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. They were hundreds of uncredited, ordinary people who played without gloves, facemasks, or performance incentives. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses, and fought against the South in the Civil War. In this myth-busting history, Thomas W. Gilbert reveals the true beginnings of baseball. Through newspaper accounts, diaries, and other accounts, he explains how it evolved through the mid-nineteenth century into a modern sport of championships, media coverage, and famous stars—all before the first professional league was formed in 1871. Winner of the Casey Award: Best Baseball Book of the Year

By 1900 Maryland's Eastern Shore, along the western side of the Delmarva Peninsula, was acknowledged in the national press as a hotbed of baseball activity. By the 1920s the game was fully ingrained into local community life, central to the summer social season among the towns and villages that measured their worth by the quality of their teams. Providing fresh insight into early 20th century baseball at its grassroots, this book explores the Chesapeake Bay region as a case study for the enthusiasm (and hubris) the game brought to rural American life, in context with national trends and influences.

Outsider Baseball is the story of a forgotten world, where independent professional ball clubs zig-zagged across America, plying their trade in big cities and small villages alike. Included among the former and future major leaguers were mercenaries, scalawags, and outcasts. This is where Babe Ruth, Rube Waddell, and John McGraw crossed bats with the Cuban Stars, Tokyo Giants, Brooklyn Bushwicks, dozens of famous Negro league teams, and novelty acts such as the House of David and Bloomer Girls. Legends emerged in this alternate baseball universe and author Scott Simkus sets out to share their stories and use a critical lens to separate fact from fiction. Written in a gritty prose style, Outsider Baseball combines meticulous research with modern analytics, opening the door to an unforgettable funhouse of baseball history. Scott Simkus is the founder and editor of the Outsider Baseball Bulletin. He is the winner of a research award from the Society of American Baseball Research for his work on the Negro League Database.

An in-depth and multiperspectival look at the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal and its roots in the culture of baseball fandom. In 2017 the Houston Astros won their first World Series title, a particularly uplifting victory for the city following Hurricane Harvey. But two years later, the feel-good energy was gone after The Athletic revealed that the Astros had stolen signs from opposing catchers during their championship season, perhaps even during the playoffs and World Series. Their methods were at once high-tech and crude: staff took video of opponents’ pitching signals and transmitted the footage in real time to the Astros’ dugout, where players banged on trash cans to signal to their teammates at bat which pitches were coming their way. Wry observers labeled them the Asterisks, pointing to the title that no longer seemed so earned. Astros and Asterisks examines the scandal from historical, journalistic, legal, ethical, and cultural perspectives. Authors delve into the Astros’ winning-above-all attitude, cultivated by a former McKinsey consultant; the significance of hiring a pitcher recently suspended for domestic abuse; the career-ending effects of the Astros’ transgression on opposing players; and the ethically fraught choices necessary to participate in sign-stealing. Ultimately, it links the Astros’ choices to the sporting world’s obsession with analytics. What emerges is a sobering tale about the impact of new technology on a game whose romanticized image feels increasingly incongruous with its reality in the era of big data and video.

Russ Cohen gives us a look back at the baseball strike of 1994-1995 as seen through the eyes of Nikco Riesgo, a "replacement player."

Tony Gwynn is the greatest hitter in the history of baseball. That's the conclusion of this engaging and provocative analysis of baseball's all-time best hitters. Michael Schell challenges the traditional list of all-time hitters, which places Ty Cobb first, Gwynn 16th, and includes just 8 players whose prime came after 1960. Schell argues that the raw batting averages used as the list's basis should be adjusted to take into account that hitters played in different eras, with different rules, and in different ballparks. He makes those adjustments and produces a new list of the best 100 hitters that will spark debate among baseball fans and statisticians everywhere. Schell combines the two qualifications essential for a book like this. He is a professional statistician--applying his skills to cancer research--and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball. He has wondered how to rank hitters since he was a boy growing up as a passionate Cincinnati Reds fan. Over the years, he has analyzed the most important factors, including the relative difficulty of hitting in different ballparks, the length of hitters' careers, the talent pool that players are drawn from, and changes in the game that raised or lowered major-league batting averages (the introduction of the designated hitter and changes in the height and location of the pitcher's mound, for example). Schell's study finally levels the playing field, giving new credit to hitters who played in adverse conditions and downgrading others who faced fewer obstacles. His final ranking of players differs dramatically from the traditional list. Gwynn, for example, bumps Cobb to 2nd place, Rod Carew rises from 28th to 3rd, Babe Ruth drops from 9th to 16th, and Willie Mays comes from off the list to rank 13th. Schell's list also gives relatively more credit to modern players, containing 39 whose best days were after 1960. Using a fun, conversational style, the book presents a feast of stories and statistics about players, ballparks, and teams--all arranged so that calculations can be skipped by general readers but consulted by statisticians eager to follow Schell's methods or introduce their students to such basic concepts as mean, histogram, standard deviation, p-value, and regression. Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters will shake up how baseball fans view the greatest heroes of America's national pastime.

This is an anthology of 14 papers that were presented at the Ninth Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, held in June 1997 and co-sponsored by the State University of New York at Oneonta and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. To mark the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breaking the color barrier in major league baseball the 1997 Symposium was dedicated to Robinson. These papers focus on Robinson, baseball, and race relations and are divided into three parts: "Before Robinson," "Robinson and Social Change" and "The Legacy of Robinson." The preface is by series editor Alvin L. Hall, and an introduction is provided by the editor of the volume, Peter M. Rutkoff.