Old Time Baseball

Harvey Frommer revisits baseball's rough early years and tries to recreate how the game looked, smelled, and felt in its wildest period. The account opens with the sport's invention in 1842, which it credits to a descendant of a British sea captain rather than to Abner Doubleday.

From there the book follows the game's growth, beginning with the first contests on an undeveloped plot at 27th and Madison in New York and carrying the story to the turn of the century. By then the National League was rising as the foremost stage for genuinely professional play.