Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game
Product Code: 9780743294034
Our Price: $26.00
Description
Think you know how the game of baseball began? Think again. Forget Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. Forget Alexander Joy Cartwright and the New York Knickerbockers. In Baseball in the Garden of Eden John Thorn reveals the real history of the game. Thorn, Official Historian of Major League Baseball, traces the games origins from its earliest days as a vehicle for gambling. He shows how the New York version of the game prevailed and explains the crucial role that a small religious cult played in shaping baseballs creation myth. Colorful figures such as Jim Creighton, perhaps the first true professional ballplayer, and Albert Spalding, the ballplayer-entrepreneur who chose Abner Doubleday as baseballs father, made the game our national pastimethe perfect sport for nineteenth-century America, a land of glory and greed.