This is not so much a review of Baseball in the Garden of Eden as it is a promotion of the book because I don’t have much to say that is critical, or even knowledgeable, about the text. The summary of what I’m about to say is just: It’s excellent, and you ought to read it, whether or not you’re interested in the subject matter.

I’m totally not. It’s not that I’m actually hostile to 19^th century baseball, it’s more like I don’t care about it very much. Subscribers to Bill James On Line probably all get this, to a greater or lesser degree:  people who don’t know me very well but who understand that I spend at least an hour or two every day reading or writing or talking about baseball also assume that I care equally about all aspects of baseball, which is plainly not the case. I have my areas of interest, and right down at the bottom of my areas of interest is "19^th-century baseball." I almost literally could not care less about 19^th century baseball.

But I do care about history. That’s where John Thorn’s book excels, and that’s why I enjoyed reading it so much. It provides a thoroughly researched, exhaustively sourced, and extremely credible account of the game’s origins, written in a witty, sprightly style that told me everything I’ll ever need to know about the way the game evolved and what it (most likely) evolved from, tracing all the steps involved in that often complicated evolutionary process. It delineates all of the events, as far they can be known from this remove, and all the personalities involved in that process, as well as the historical forces, the accidents of fate, and all of the other influences on baseball’s early growth. I can’t imagine that anyone is going to feel the need for another book on this subject, other than books that elaborate on  individuals or events that John Thorn wisely summarized for the sake of a smooth narrative line.

This is a work of history. It explains the early game in cultural contexts that no longer exist today, as such, while it makes those contexts clear. For example, one of the many, many things I had no clue about is the relationship between "baseball" and "theosophy." Before I read this book, I would have posited no possible connection between the two concepts, yet Thorn shows how vital that connection was in late 19^th- and very early 20^th-century society, how crucial figures such as A.G. Spalding and Abner Doubleday were intimately drawn to the beliefs of powerful philosophical thinkers such as Madame Olga Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge, the founders of the Theosophical Society, a spiritual brotherhood that sought to make clear the unknown principles of the universe.

If there’s one thing I don’t know about nor care about less than 19^th century baseball, it has got to be 19^th century systems of spiritual brotherhood. I mean, I care about both to the extent that they still maintain some sort of vague influence over our lives today, so it’s somewhat important that I get the thrust of what they were about, but that’s all I need—the thrust. I don’t feel any crying need to understand the fine details of 19^th century baseball or spiritual brotherhood because I find them each to be a confused, debased, misguided attempt to organize something that in my lifetime I’ve found to be clear, comprehensible, and very well organized. (By which I mean the systems of "baseball" and "philosophical beliefs," both of which I very much enjoy devoting time and effort to thinking about.) I don’t need to watch go-karts crashing into each other for hours on end to appreciate how to drive a car; it’s sufficient for my purposes to know that go-karts crash into each other, and that some people enjoy crashing them or watching them crash.

John Thorn provides that thrust. The essence I took from his book makes a world of sense: the origins of the game are ultimately lost in time, though we can make intelligent guesses to fill in most of the blank areas, but at a specific point in time, 1905, baseball formed a commission to arrive at a definitive origin. To fulfill its mission, the Mills Commission made up a lot of misleading half-truths that oversimplified and misconstrued baseball’s history, while also recording the hit tune "Paper Doll." No, wait, that was the Mills Brothers. The Mills Commission just generated the misleading bubbemeisehs. (Yiddish for "fake news.") The main principle behind the slanted version of the truth that the Mills Commission dispensed was "patriotism," in a virulent form that we no longer buy into nowadays—the further back you trace  the origins of baseball, the likelier it is that you take those origins out of the United States entirely, or previous to the formation of the U.S.  If colonial boys were playing baseball, then the game is essentially British, and we can’t possibly have that, can we? So the unstated object of the Commission was to locate baseball’s origins by fixing them in the continental U.S. sometime after July 4, 1776, preferably with an American hero. The beard they pinned it on was the Union General (then a captain) who defended Fort Sumter, and the year they picked was either 1839 or 1841 (inexplicably, 1840 was ruled ineligible), in an improbable tale that some didn’t buy at the time and that no one buys today, in part because we tend to emphasize the question of "Is this actually so?" over the question of "How patriotic does this sound?"

To my mind (with Thorn supplying the nitty-gritty details of what I only imagine), baseball began thousands of times in world history, pretty much every time you found two kids with some sort of stick and some sort of spherical object that they could hit with that stick. The game, as it was played by grown men in the first half of the nineteenth century, was a codified version of those childhood games, with various iterations of the rules that the grown men agreed upon, differing from region to region, or even from game to individual game. I can easily imagine one set of rules that a group of players agreed to in the morning that were changed, by mutual consent, in another game played on the same field that afternoon with many of the same players. No matter, if an inning lasts four outs this afternoon but lasted two innings this morning, or if hitting the ball into the tall grass counts as a home run or an out, right? What the hell…

I used to do this all time, and so did you and so did John Thorn, when we were boys. In my environment growing up, New York City streets, the bases would change depending on which cars were parked at various points lining the streets. A Pontiac might be first base and a DeSoto would be third base in the morning game, but by noon a Chrysler and a Ford sedan would have replaced those cars and would be parked ten feet further from the manhole cover we used for home plate (and ten feet closer to the second manhole cover, which we called a "sewie," that we used for second base). I’m sure such adjustments to the playing field influenced our strategy, such as it was, in each game but we understood that it was just a kids’ game and didn’t matter one tiny bit as long as we got to hang out and run around, which was the whole point.

With grown men in the early 19^th century, "hanging out" might have been worded as "associating with other gentlemen" and "run around" might have been phrased as "seeking wholesome exercise," but early baseball had much more in common with kids playing stickball on Brooklyn streets than it had with the Dodgers playing a far more rigorous, systematized form of the game a few hundred sewers away. Attempts to dress up early 19^th century baseball as a version of what the Brooklyn Dodgers were doing are, to my mind, mistaken. In retrospect, you could make Jim Creighton, for example, the equivalent of Sandy Koufax a century later, but that would be arguing by analogy. Yes, Creighton was doing something that in many ways resembled what Koufax would do later, and yes he got some of the same sort of appreciation from his peers that Koufax got from his, and on and on, but you could as well argue that Creighton was also doing something that closely resembled what the legendary stickball players in my neighborhood were doing. Johnny Aleo, an older kid from across the street who later had a tryout with the Yankees, could put a spin on a Spaldeen like you couldn’t believe, absolutely unhittable.

Of course, that’s also an analogy, and it also falls apart very soon, but that’s my point. All arguments by analogy collapse into complete idiocy after a short while. They’re not meant to stand up as point-by-point equivalences, just as useful illustrations of a concept. The difficulty here is that, as with all evolution, there is no single point at which we can state that "baseball" before this date was a disorganized, chaotic mish-mosh but on the next morning it became a professional and codified enterprise. But that is exactly where the Mills Commission report, published in 1908, went wrong, in trying to fix a date, and locate an inventor, or find a team, or any of that, to identify baseball’s origins with any real precision. It can’t be done, and John Thorn has shown how and why that goal is illusory.

In the course of reaching that common-sense conclusion, though, he provides reliable details and fascinating documents explaining every step along the path to reaching the form of major league baseball that we’ve had, in a more or less stable form, since the creation of the American League in 1901, which is where I begin to be interested in professional baseball. (Allowing, of course, for individuals like Honus Wagner and Cy Young and Sam Crawford, whose professional careers were underway by 1901, and which I’m certainly interested in knowing about. Let’s call their early careers a gray area, and the early careers of men who played very briefly in the post-1901 era an even grayer area, but everything before that is pure black as far as my interest goes.) Even now, a week or so after finishing John Thorn’s book, the fine points he drew between, say, Joseph Carlisle, proprietor of the Magnolia Lunch Club, an early sponsor of athletic competitions, and Dave Broderick, a similar owner of a lower-Manhattan saloon a few miles to the north of the Magnolia, begin to fade, but the relationship between the two men was perfectly clear to me as I was reading it, and the biographies of individuals is not what I need from a history book, anyway. It’s sufficient that I understand that, in this book right here, there are plain, intelligent, perceptive descriptions of complex processes and I now know where to find them if I ever need to. Meanwhile the book was a sheer delight to read, beautifully written, beautifully illustrated.

Thorn not only seems to have enjoyed finding out all these details about the early game, which is a pleasure in itself, but he actually seems to hold the game of early baseball in a very high esteem. When I lived in Thorn’s neck of the woods, upstate New York (I taught for a few years at SUNY-Albany), I played in a game or two of 19^th-century baseball—I think the Schenectady chapter of SABR sponsored these games. At any rate, there were a bunch of local SABR members who really got into these games. I was out for a little exercise, and I was curious to meet my fellow SABR members, but I wasn’t really interested in memorizing the fine points of the game for their own sake as much as I was interested in knowing things like "What’s it like playing the game without a concept of ‘foul territory’? What’s different about the rules, the weird positioning, catching the ball if you don’t have a glove, etc.?" and my curiosity was easily satisfied.

Thorn, I think, feels far more passionately than that, and reaches a far different conclusion with the same facts than I do after learning about the early game. This isn’t completely unheard of. I once gave a paper at an International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference in Nice, I think, wherein I scoured Fitzgerald’s novels, short stories, letters, essays and biographies to show passages of his writing that illustrated the superficiality of his alleged interest in modernism, in Marxism, in Freudian psychology. At the same conference, a colleague gave a paper that argued for the diametrically opposite conclusion—that Fitzgerald was in fact a highly sophisticated thinker concerning modernist art, Marx, and Freud, applying these concepts subtly and appropriately throughout his work.

The funny part of this was that, completely unplanned, we each cited the same exact passages in Fitzgerald’s work to support our opposite theses. He interpreted them differently, of course, stressing the essence, rather than the language, of a passage, for example, concluding that the essence represented Fitzgerald’s thought processes, while I was citing how the language Fitzgerald used displayed a massive fundamental misunderstanding of Freud, or Marx, or whatever.

We both found it hilarious, and laugh about it to this day, the point being that it’s entirely possible to use the same material to reach opposed conclusions. John Thorn immerses us in loads of really fascinating ideas, events, and people that caused baseball to take the shape it has, and I admire his great skill as a historian and a writer that allow us to follow his reasoning in connecting all the disparate threads that got woven into making baseball what it is today, while still allowing us to draw our own conclusions from the data he supplies.

One of the many themes that Thorn’s book pulls to the surface is early baseball’s close ties to gambling. He shows how gambling was a natural aspect of any sort of athletic competition, and how it is capable of destroying our conception of equitable play. I’m not a gambler—never been to Vegas or Atlantic City, nor ever wanted to—I’ve probably won a grand total in my lifetime of under a thousand dollars on cards, horse-racing, football pools, and the like, while losing just over a thousand, purely to be sociable.    I’m not opposed morally to gambling so much as I think it’s wasteful of my time and, if I let it, my wallet. But Thorn stresses the essential role that gambling played in early baseball, explaining something that I may have thought but not confirmed: baseball is interesting to me only to the extent that it is fair. The more I think that a game might be fixed, or that a player, for reasons of his own, isn’t trying hard to win, the more I’m not interested in the outcome of that game.

When the Giants played the Dodgers in the early 1960s, for example, I was (and am) certain that Willie Mays would exert himself as much as possible to hit the best pitches that Don Drysdale could throw. That was the entire point of my interest in the outcome—that both supremely skilled players in direct competition with each other were trying their hardest to win. As passionately as I felt about baseball in those days, my interest would have shrunk to a nubbin by the suggestion that Mays or Drysdale didn’t really care who won the 1962 N.L. pennant, and "gambling" inherently carries with it that suggestion.

That suggestion, though, was all over the place in 19^th century baseball—games were thrown right and left, bets were freely being made, and the only real question was which players were hard-core gamblers and which ones were naïve about their teammates who were openly gambling on the outcomes of the games. Thorn reports that "gambling was as American as apple pie and baseball," quoting De Tocqueville on Americans’ fondness for "all undertakings in which chance plays a part."

Thorn draws a direct line between cricket, which in 1740s England "was driven by gambling" and American baseball a century later via the English-born cricket-aficionado turned putative father of baseball Henry Chadwick, whose invention of baseball stats remained "clearly…oblivious to the fact that while he was submitting innovations for the ‘consideration of the fraternity,’ he was helping to enhance the game for the gambling faction." The stats we all know and love, in other words, began at least in very large part as a medium to place wagers on. Later, as gambling finally (?) got driven out of baseball and the game became a reliably clean sport, we still have Chadwick’s stats to know, love, and cherish.

For me, the intertwining of gambling and baseball is just one major consideration, sufficient in itself, to rule out early baseball as a sport I give a damn about. I have near-zero ability to concentrate my attention on any sport whose outcome may be primarily determined by factors outside of the playing field. For some, I suppose that "gambling" doesn’t matter much—these folks still have the illusion of a fair game and don’t mind particularly if the outcome is rigged so long as they don’t have knowledge themselves of which way it’s rigged, but for me gambling is a total buzzkill, and as I say (and more importantly, as Thorn demonstrates), gamblers’ filthy fingers were all over the game in the 19^th century.

I have other issues with the 19^th century game (I have more issues than Reader’s Digest and National Geographic combined) but gambling just kills the game for me. Of course, we still have gambling in baseball at high levels well into the blessed 20^th century, and possibly (for all I know) into the 21^st, but I choose to think of post-1900 baseball as mostly untainted by gambling, fixes, laying down, with rare but notable exceptions. This is convenient thinking, I know, drawing a line after 1900 and declaring baseball beyond that point, quite arbitrarily, as a sport worthy of my devoted attention, while drawing a big black X over all previous iterations of the sport.

I understand perfectly how arbitrary that division is. Baseball as played in the fall of 1900 is probably not much different from the game as played in the spring of 1901, if at all, but my rationale is that if we don’t draw an arbitrary line somewhere, then we’re going to justify classifying the very earliest forms of the game as "Major League Baseball."  In his precise descriptions of those early forms of baseball, John Thorn explicates, in horrifying detail to my mind, all of the gross differences that (again, to me) allow the drawing of that big black X:  posts for bases, pitchers tossing deliberately hittable balls up to batters, umpires being tricked on purpose in every play (when they’re not actually rooting for one team over another), the number of fielders being determined by how many players are available on a given day, and on and on and on—we eventually reach a point where "baseball" isn’t even baseball, much less "Major League Baseball," and wherever that point lies, that’s where you choose to draw your line. But you’re being as arbitrary as I am, because that form of primitive baseball is no different from the day before or the day after, no more than spring of 1901 is different from fall of 1900. Any starting point chosen as "the true beginning of Major League Baseball" is bound to be an arbitrary point, so I choose the first game of the American League as the arbitrary point at which my interest in MLB begins. Baseball was never invented. Like Topsy (to quote from a popular novel in Jim Creighton’s final decade), it just growed. (Thorn attributes the quote from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Henry Chadwick in squelching the pernicious myth of Abner Doubleday, a squelch that lacked force at the time but has grown more powerful with time.)

Baseball in the Garden of Eden is wide-open to all sorts of possibilities for the game’s origin that have little to do with Civil War generals, bucolic all-American settings, or any particular date. It traces the more primitive origins, historically, all the way back to ancient Egypt, ca. 1460 B.C., under Thutmose III, where it was known as "seker-hemat," or "batting the ball." (No, I’m not making any of this up.) I’m pretty sure if Thorn had set out to find the origins of the game we in Brooklyn called "salujee," he could find some eons-old version among the Hottentots or the Inuit, and possibly among the higher apes or lesser vertebrates. This is some killer research Thorn has performed here, and it all points strongly to the game of baseball (in some form) preceding western civilization. Even A.G. Mills in late 1907 conceded that some primitive form of the game could be traced "at least to the palmy days of the Chaldean Empire!" (Thorn quotes this letter fully, as he does with many other charming artifacts of Victorian or Edwardian prose.)

In the comments to my last article, Ventboys speculated that Bill James makes his similar choice to dismiss 19^th-century baseball because of the inconvenience in translating 19^th-century ball’s statistics (which sometimes count "walks" as hits, other times as outs, still other times as nothing, among a panoply of numerical quirks and tetches), and while there may be a kernel of truth to Ventboys’ speculation, I remain convinced that Bill’s most profound objection is not the added work that computing older stats requires but, rather, the debased quality of play in early baseball. I don’t want to speak for Bill, that’s just my guess, but it’s certainly my principal reason for lack of interest in baseball before 1901.

I’ve played enough pickup softball games in my time to see certain similarities between what I was doing as a young man seeking recreation and exercise and what the very earliest gentlemen’s clubs were doing. Your side has only eight men and our side has twelve? Here, borrow one of our guys for the afternoon. Or let’s play eight to a side. Or maybe, ok, you can have eight fielders and we can have twelve—the important thing is, Let’s have fun out there.

I don’t seek to delegitimize early baseball—it was great in its time, and an essential building block in forming later baseball, and all that, but please. Let’s not pretend that it was what it turned into. From a historical perspective, it’s all good. I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to make heroes of the Jim Creightons and King Kellys of the world—they were, historically considered, vitally important early players, and Thorn shows us precisely how highly they were thought of by their contemporaries.  But I think the quality of play is improving all the time, by bigger leaps and longer bounds than most folks think possible (I’ll try to elaborate on my reasoning in the next article) and there’s an awful lot of time between Jim Creighton’s day and ours, so much time that I believe a one-to-one comparison between Creighton and Clayton Kershaw, for example, isn’t fair to either man. Can you compare the skills of Orville Wright to those of, say, Neil Armstrong? On what basis? Bravery? Motor skills? Ambition? Engineering know-how? Better to say each one was highly skilled, given his day and age and equipment and conditions, than to try to find specific similarities and differences between the two. If you want to put them both in the Rocketry Hall of Fame, that’s fine with me, as long as your definition of a Hall of Famer allows that. My definition might not, but hey, that’s horse-racing.

You might find, among my somewhat hyperbolic remarks here, a certain disrespect for John Thorn’s work, but nothing could be further from my intention. On the contrary, I’m overstating my distaste for 19^th century baseball in the firm belief that most of my readers find his subject matter of far greater inherent appeal than I do. If that’s so, then how much more drawn to Thorn’s sparkling prose will they be than I am, whose interest in his subject matter is practically nil? He has achieved something close to miraculous here, taking a subject that bores me silly, writing about it in great detail, and yet giving me the most pleasure in a book I have had all year. (I finished it after Christmas, so no smart remarks, please, about how short "all year" is at this point.) It’s quite literally a fabulous piece of work, erudite, perceptive, scholarly and eminently readable. Read it and see.