A historical account of baseball and its key contributors describes its 1842 invention by a British sea captain's descendant, its early games on a vacant lot in New York, and the rise of professional leagues.

An in-depth account of the 1897 pennant race describes the cutthroat, season-long rivalry between the Baltimore Orioles, known as the dirtiest team in baseball, and the Boston Beaneaters, a competition that came down to a three-game series that became the most intensely watched team sporting event in American history to that time.

Product Description: The book analyzes the process by which the collective image of professional baseball was formed. It traces both the negation and the affirmation of ideas in the sports press that would impede or promote the growth of baseball from a recreational pastime to a team sport spectacle in the mid-19th century...read more

Product Description: Helms Hall of Fame's brothers William M. and Andrew B. "June" Rankin lived exciting lives covering sports for papers like the New York Sunday Mercury, New York Herald, New York World, Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Clipper from 1870 to 1930...read more

Product Description: By 1871, the popularity of baseball had spread so thoroughly across America that one writer observed, "It is as much our national game as cricket is that of the English." While major league teams and athletes that played after this prophetic statement was made have been exhaustively documented and analyzed, those that led the game during its pioneer phase from 1850 to 1870 have received relatively little attention...read more

Product Description: Now available in paperback, the “fresh and fascinating” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), “splendid and brilliant” (Philadelphia Daily News) history of the early game by the Official Historian of Major League Baseball.Who really invented baseball? Forget Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown and Alexander Cartwright...read more

In its infancy, major league baseball was anyone’s game, open to a dizzying array of rogues and scamps, athletic giants and captains of industry, hustlers, managers, and umpires who transformed club-based teams into the first professional federations with formalized rules—and commercial considerations. This two-volume work—with its profiles of every key contributor to the major league game from May 4, 1871, through December 31, 1900—is truly “inside baseball.” Volume 1 profiles all the key position players and pitchers of the nineteenth century, giving detailed information about each player’s role in the game, his debut and finale, high points and low, most important achievements, relationship to ground-breaking diamond occurrences, in addition to fascinating personal information.Volume 2 features Hall of Famers who played in the era, as well as twenty other figures who aren't yet enshrined but arguably should be because of their considerable impact on the game. It also profiles early day baseball’s crooks, madcaps, homicide victims, suicides, and missing persons, in addition to the managers, team owners, and umpires who helped give the game its structure and shape.More than a collection of mere facts and statistics, Major League Baseball Profiles provides a unique history of the evolution of major league baseball, from the date of the first major league game in 1871 through the 1900 season, which marked not only the close of a century but also the unofficial end of what many believe to be the formative period of the game.

Product Description: This is the first book to examine in close detail the 1890 and 1891 major-league seasons, recapturing a colorful era in early baseball history when club owners quarreled, players berated umpires, sportswriters criticized and ridiculed both owners and players, and the National Game, as it was universally called, made halting progress toward the sport and business it became in the twentieth century...read more

Product Description: “All fans of baseball, all fans of a good story, will love this book." — Professor Gordon Wood, Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winner “This is a beautifully written, meticulously researched story about a bygone baseball era that even die-hard fans will find foreign, and about a pitcher who might have been the greatest of all time...read more

Product Description: This volume examines early black baseball as it was represented in the artwork and written accounts of the popular press. From contemporary postbellum articles, illustrations, photographs and woodcuts, a unique image of the black athlete emerges, one that was not always positive but was nonetheless central in understanding the evolving black image in American culture...read more

Product Description: This history of America's pastime describes the evolution of baseball from early bat and ball games to its growth and acceptance in different regions of the country. Such New York clubs as the Atlantics, Excelsiors and Mutuals are a primary focus, serving as examples of how the sport became more sophisticated and popular...read more

Product Description: By the start of the 1870s, the game of "base ball" had been building momentum for a couple of decades as the new national past time. From Boston to New York to Philadelphia, base ball "clubs" had been forming around the country. From the first game to be reported in a newspaper in 1853 to the first all-star game in 1858 to the first fully professional baseball team in 1869, minor and major milestones ultimately led to the formation of the first professional baseball league...read more

Details the thirty thousand mile goodwill tour by Albert Goodwill Spalding and twenty of baseball's greatest players to introduce baseball and the American way of life to the world, and bring business to his nacent sporting goods company along the way.

Product Description: During the Civil War, Americans from homefront to battlefront played baseball as never before. While soldiers slaughtered each other over the country's fate, players and fans struggled over the form of the national pastime. George Kirsch gives us a color commentary of the growth and transformation of baseball during the Civil War...read more

Product Description: How and why Americans chose baseball over its early rival, cricket, as the national pastimeGeorge B. Kirsch takes us back to amateur playing fields around the country to re-create the excitement of the early matches, the players, clubs, and their fans...read more

Product Description: Moses Fleetwood Walker was the first black American to play baseball in a major league. But Walker is more than a footnote: his life demonstrates both the devastation of racism and the role of baseball as a symbol of the nation. Walker achieved college baseball stardom while he was a student at Oberlin College in the 1880s...read more

Product Description: As the Civil War ended, the thoughts of many Northern soldiers turned to a game that some had learned about for the first time during the war--baseball. Their newfound interest in the sport, combined with the postwar economic boom and the resultant growth of many cities, took the game from one practiced by a few amateur clubs in New York City before the war to a professional sport covering almost the entire northeastern United States...read more