The untold story of baseball's nineteenth-century origins: "a delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat" (Paul Dickson, The Wall Street Journal).You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn't. Perhaps you've read that baseball's color line wa...

He threw the first fastball. The first curveball. He was baseball’s first star—and its first tragedy.In Death in the Strike Zone, acclaimed historian Thomas W. Gilbert uncovers the forgotten life of James Creighton, the first American ballplayer to become a national sensation. On the eve of the Civil War, Creighton invented something utterly new in baseball – modern pitching. Creighton was so dominant, so mesmerizing, that the game had to rewrite the ruleb...

He threw the first fastball. The first curveball. He was baseball’s first star—and its first tragedy.In Death in the Strike Zone, acclaimed historian Thomas W. Gilbert uncovers the forgotten life of James Creighton, the first American ballplayer to become a national sensation. On the eve of the Civil War, Creighton invented something utterly new in baseball – modern pitching. Creighton was so dominant, so mesmerizing, that the game had to rewrite the ruleb...

The fascinating, true, origin story of baseball—how America’s first great sport developed and how it conquered a nationBaseball’s true founders don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. The founders were the hundreds of uncredited amateurs—ordinary people—who played without gloves, facemasks, or performance incentives in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses, and fo...