How do you think baseball got its start? Most likely, you are wrong. The Abner Doubleday story set in Cooperstown was a created fiction, as was the story about Alexander Cartwright. Neither upstate New York in 1939 nor the Elysian Fields of Hoboken in 1846 were the birth site. So, how did baseball come about? Pick up this book, and let Thomas Gilbert tell you the long, complicated story of how this happened. The short version: a kid's game was transformed, over time and mostly in New York City, into a pastime for adults, which in a few decades became the National Pastime.

This book is as much a history of America in the mid-1800s as it is about baseball, because you can't talk about baseball without talking about the country where it was born. America shaped baseball, then baseball shaped America. There are a lot of hands involved in the birth, and not all of them are clean. Gilbert takes us on a ride with people like Doc Adams, Harry Wright, Asa Brainard, Henry Chadwick, Mike Walsh, Frank Jones, and Jim Creighton. You will learn how militias, volunteer fire companies, and chowder dinners are linked to the early days of baseball. You will find out about the lines between amateur and professional baseball, and how those became blurred. And you will encounter historical figures like William Lloyd Garrison, Millicent Fenwick, Aaron Burr, Matthew Brady, and the Bowery Boys, plus the strange history of Tammany Hall.

Gilbert writes with the cynicism and skeptical outlook needed for someone investigating a story that is purposely surrounded in mystery due to the money that became involved in it, and for the mystique-building used by people trying to popularize the sport and sell it first as a healthful way to exercise, then to sell sports equipment (read: Albert Spalding). It is well-written, informative, and a way to lose yourself in a misunderstood period of American history. It's about 350 pages of text, but it reads fast. Gilbert will engagingly tell you lots of things you didn't know, and that you didn't know you didn't know. Highly recommended.