Baseball in the Garden of Eden

The Secret History of the Early Game

By: John Thorn

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

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. Meet Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and other fascinating figures buried beneath the falsehoods that have accrued around baseball's origins. This is the true story of how organized baseball started, how gambling shaped the game from its earliest days, and how it became our national pastime and our national mirror.

Baseball in the Garden of Eden draws on original research to tell how the game evolved from other bat-and-ball games and gradually supplanted them, how the New York game came to dominate other variants, and how gambling and secret professionalism promoted and plagued the game. From a religious society's plot to anoint Abner Doubleday as baseball's progenitor to a set of scoundrels and scandals far more pervasive than the Black Sox Fix of 1919, this entertaining book is full of surprises. Even the most expert baseball fan will learn something new with almost every fact.

©2011 John Thorn (P)2021 Tantor

Good analysis of game origins but . . .

John Thorn has done a very thorough job of researching the origins of baseball. He details the context of how baseball evolved out of other bat and ball games in early America such as cricket, rounders, town ball, and 1-cat etc. games. The focus of the game is the 19th century organized game, both amateur clubs and the development of pro ball. My problem with the book is the last 1/3-1/4 of the book devolves into a biography of Albert Spalding and his ties to Theosophy. Thorn goes into detail about the history of Theosophy and development in the USA, particularly California. Yet, he doesn't show how Spalding's (and Abner Doubleday's) involvement with the movement had any tangible effect on the development of baseball. If I was reading the book, I would have skipped through the large sections dealing with theosophy to get back to the baseball topics. Unfortunately, that is too hard to manage with an audio recording.

TL;DR: If you are interested in the development of baseball you'll enjoy the book, but beware of the extensive tangents into the history of Theosophy.