Baseball in the Garden of Eden:
The Secret History of the Early Game
by John Thorn
It's an annual ritual, on a par with pitchers and catchers reporting in mid-February, the pomp and circumstance of Opening Day, and the passionate denouement that is the World Series: my yearly off-season quest for a literary baseball fix to get me through the dark, game-less days of Winter.
This year's entry into that long tradition is
John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden. Subtitled "The Secret History of the Early Game," veteran writer and researcher Thorn's volume utilizes a two pronged approach to cover the baseball's earliest development. Much of the text is devoted to a straightforward narrative of the game's evolution from various forerunner activities into the sport that would become the nation's pastime. Wrapped around that core history is Thorn's somewhat well-documented, somewhat speculative account of the "secret history" that surrounds baseball's "creation myth"--specifically, the doings of the members of the Mills Commission of the early 1900s and their specious conclusion that the Civil War hero Abner Doubleday created the game out of whole cloth one day in Cooperstown, New York in 1839.
Thorn's narrative about the origins of the game--who really developed the rules of baseball, where and when the game truly became "baseball" (rather than ancestral forms like "rounders" or "three old cat"), where and when those pioneers played the game, and how it evolved into the sport we've followed for roughly 130 years--is far more successful than the other half of his presentation. Die-hard fans, even those well versed in the history of the game, will learn new and fascinating facts about early baseball, including: the antiquity of some of baseball's current rules (e.g., the rule that the catcher must cleanly catch a third strike to record the out goes all the way back to the earliest schedule of regulations, the Knickerbocker Club's rules from the 1850s); the fact that the "World Series" was played, under that specific name, as the post-season championship between the National League and the American Association, long before the 1903 detente between the NL and the new American League; that the DH was proposed, and almost enacted, back in the 19th century; and the eternal fact that free agency, player salaries, and ownership shenanigans (including syndicate ownership of multiple teams) were crucial concerns then as much as now. All of Thorn's revelations about baseball's primordial form and environment serve to deeply enrich the hardcore fan's appreciation of where the sport has been, and perhaps where it may yet go.
Unfortunately, the other side of Thorn's narrative--his meticulous examination of the development of the Doubleday creation myth--provides less interesting fare, even for the reader most primed for this sort of history. The author's study and speculations on the Mills Commission, the role Albert Spalding played in ginning up the Cooperstown fantasy (it was known contemporaneously to be a humbug among those in the know, despite the poobahs' pronunciations on the matter), even his conspiratorial notions about the role the Theosophical Society (of all things) played in the creation scheme--all of this examination proves to be of little particular interest.
Perhaps the problem is one of time and perspective. While this story might have been a revelation to baseball fans 50 years ago, today almost no baseball fan believes the Doubleday story. Even the favored alternate history, placing Alexander Cartwright in the sport's primal position, has been superseded by further revelations on baseball's antiquity, in some form or another, far exceeding Hoboken's Elysian Fields in 1845. (Thorn himself notes the now well-known reference to baseball, in the laws of the town of Pittsfield, MA, from 1792.) Since the whole thing is now widely regarded a sham, today's reader can see little more than a historical curiosity in the tale of American chauvinism and vague Victorian spiritualism leading Spalding to rig up Doubleday (a fellow Theosophist) as baseball's Prometheus. The creation myth exegesis is a story that probably won't resonate with most readers, and holds little connection to the modern organization of baseball, beyond the continuing location of baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Thus,
Baseball in the Garden of Eden reaches to the reader as only half of a good story--or rather as one good story needlessly paired with a second, much weaker story. Still, those Winter nights are long and dark, with nary a pitch, bunt, double play, or home run to take the edge off the cold. Thorn's book has the necessary ingredients to make it worth a look while waiting for the opening of Spring Training. It's about baseball, after all, and it's hard to go wrong with a book about our most literary sport.
Baseball in the Garden of Eden may not be a solid hit, but it will get the runner over to where he needs to be: in scoring position, ready to move when that hit finally does come.
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