Alexander Cartwight wrote out the first set of rules for the game of baseball as we know it in July of 1846 at Hoboken, New Jersey. Shoeless Joe Jackson was the star member of the 1919 Chicago White Sox baseball team -- the finest player of the era with a lifetime batting average of .356 -- and a member of the dubious group of players who threw the World Series that year in exchange for payment (which was never received). After Jackson and the Black Sox scandal, baseball had lost its innocence and would move on to the big business sport it was destined to become. Before Cartwright, baseball didn't exist (contrary to the popular but false myth of Abner Doubleday inventing the game in 1839). In between these two seminal figures, the game established itself across the continent, became a professional sport, fostered the construction of the first sports stadiums and the first national sports heroes and witnessed some of the greatest athletes of any century including Ty Cobb, Cyclone Young and Honus Wagner.This book, a compendium to early baseball, includes biographies of dozens of players, their statistics, and rare photographs. It also includes team histories for the more than 70 active professional teams from the Cincinnati Red Stockings (the first openly professional baseball club) in 1871 to the infamous White Sox of 1919. A season by season summary, including World Series results, is included, as well as a 15,000 word essay on the true origins of baseball and on the evolution of the sport -- including the invention of the slide, the curve ball and the bunt, among other developments.The result is both a comprehensive source of research and a fast-paced, fascinating accountof the people and places that made baseball so immediately captivating for an entire nation.
- ISBN10 1894020278
- ISBN13 9781894020275
- Publish Date 1 March 1998
- Publish Status Unknown
- Publish Country CA
- Imprint Firefly Books Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 400
- Language English