How Baseball Happened

Outrageous Lies Exposed! The True Story Revealed

By: Thomas W. Gilbert

Narrated by: George Newbern

Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

The fascinating, true origin story of baseball - how America’s first great sport developed and how it conquered a nation.

Baseball’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 19th century. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses, and fought against the South in the Civil War.

But that’s not the way the story has been told. The wrongness of baseball history can be staggering. 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. You have read that baseball’s color line was uncrossed and unchallenged until Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. You may have heard Cooperstown, Hoboken, or New York City called the birthplace of baseball, but not Brooklyn. Yet Brooklyn was the home of baseball’s first fans, the first ballpark, the first statistics - and modern pitching.

Baseball was originally supposed to be played, not watched. This changed when crowds began to show up at games in Brooklyn in the late 1850s. We fans weren’t invited to the party; we crashed it. Professionalism wasn’t part of the plan either, but when an 1858 Brooklyn versus New York City series accidentally proved that people would pay to see a game, the writing was on the outfield wall.

When the first professional league was formed in 1871, baseball was already a fully formed modern sport with championships, media coverage, and famous stars. Professional baseball invented an organization, but not the sport itself. Baseball’s amazing amateurs had already done that.

Thomas W. Gilbert’s history is for baseball fans and anyone fascinating by origin stories and American culture.

©2020 Thomas W. Gilbert (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Absolutely fascinating history, but audiobook is the wrong format: get the actual book.

This is such a fascinating and well researched book on the history of baseball, and well worth the read. But the audiobook format is not ideal (no shade on the reader, who does a very good job). The story is so complex and has some many moving parts and the chronology jumps around so it’s hard to keep track of all the moving pieces. If there was some sort of accompanying pdf of the chapter and section headings, a timeline of events, a list of some of the main figures — all that would help. Or: just buy the printed book.

interesting information

great information about the development of baseball from basically a social club for exercising to a paid sport and entertainment venue

Great history of early baseball

First, the narration is first rate. Fantastic. Secondly, the author really knows his stuff. This is a very detailed and interesting story. Sometimes he strays from the topic, sometimes very far from the topic ( Im thinking about waiters strikes, anti Immigrant sentement, and the still unsolved murder of a beautiful and mysterious cigar girl) but even these stories are interesting and colorful. Fantastic book.

Preposterously Amazing

Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. The Cincinnati Red Stockings were not the first ‘professional’ baseball team. I bet the author’s next book is going to tell me the tooth fairy was really my mom and dad.

This is easily one of the Top-Five baseball books ever written. I loved this so much that I didn’t even care about the narrator’s inability to pronounce Massachusetts town names.

superb reading. ate it up in 2 days.

I tore through this in 2 days. Ate it up and loved it. A great historical document. I even enjoyed the author's subtle quips. Completely upends Ken Burns' fairytale story of the origins of baseball and vividly depicts the time and place in which baseball evolved. I think this is a document that'll stand the test of time and could easily be relied upon by others who research or who have in interest in early baseball. I stand and applaud the author. Great work.