In the early years of my boyhood, we listened to Bill Stern's Sports on the radio. Although I did not hear Stern tell his most amazing story, my father often repeated it to me, and I took it to be God's truth. When Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theater in April of 1865, the mortally wounded president was taken across the street to the house in which he would soon pass away. In attendance at his bedside was General Abner Doubleday, a hero of the battle of Gettysburg. At the end of his agony, Lincoln beckoned to Doubleday, and whispered his last words into the general's ear: "Don't let baseball die." I knew that Doubleday had founded baseball in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Stern's story thus linked the two most important things about American life, the savior of the Republic and the national pastime.

By the time I was a knowledgeable baseball fan, the myth about Doubleday and the beginning of baseball at Cooperstown was on its last legs. The legend had justified the location of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, but everyone with even a passing knowledge of and interest in the game thought that the story was fanciful, that people had probably played baseball earlier and in other places. Baseball historians soon demonstrated these ideas with greater authority, and part of what David Block does in his curious book is to drive some last nails into the Cooperstown coffin. Baseball Before We Knew It, however, goes further and tells us how and why baseball promoters and publicists developed the tale about Doubleday and Cooperstown—they wanted to secure an American starting point for the game, and not an English one.

More important, for Block, is his challenge to the alternative accounts that have arisen since scholarship debunked the Cooperstown fable. A legion of historians has told us that in the 18th century the English played various ball games. One of these was "rounders," a game so called because the players went "round" some bases. Baseball, these historians have informed us, derives from rounders. The American game has its roots in an earlier English game that colonists transformed after they migrated to the New World.

Block argues that this story too is wrong. What really happened is that in the 1700s the English (and the French and Germans) did play a variety of games that involved upwards of two players and that used bats, balls, and bases in many different ways. One dominant set of games used bases (Block calls this set English base-ball). Both baseball and rounders came from English base-ball, but rounders developed only in England, and indeed developed later than baseball, which had an independent growth in the United States. Although the national pastime had its origins in England, rounders is not its mother but only a younger brother.

I called this book curious a couple of paragraphs back, and it is. While Block is an engaging and knowledgeable writer, the heart of Baseball Before We Knew It is an exhaustive and annotated bibliography of references to early "baseball" in a variety of books and pamphlets. There are also other lengthy odds and ends of bibliographical information. Many interesting illustrations depict these early games and accompany the bibliographies. Block uses this hard-won information in several of his chapters to make his case that American baseball is independent of rounders. Nonetheless, there is inevitably some overlap between analysis and bibliography, and considerable repetition. Moreover, the 55-page bibliography wearies even a committed reader (me).

That is not all. The author's brother has written one separate chapter (on the Doubleday question) that does not exactly fit with anything else. Two other chapters (they are called appendices) reprint essays on the beginnings of ball games by other historians. Baseball Before We Knew It is a valuable examination of early instances of ball games, and Block is a careful and serious guide. But this is more an antiquarian compendium than anything else.

The genre of scholarship that the book exemplifies also reached its high point in the 19th century, when research into origins consumed scholars. Where was the first human language? How did the books of the Bible, or the Homeric poems, come to be written? What was the oldest religion, and how had it developed into higher forms? The approach to these questions lay in what I call conjectural history. It joined tiny fragments of evidence to complex theories. Something must have happened in the past to produce the piece of evidence that we now had; if this piece of evidence meant thus-and-so, well, that was consistent with what we made of the next piece of evidence that might date from a few hundred years later. Conjectural history had some notable successes—surely Darwin's ideas—but many foolish and plainly false speculative narratives also litter the scholarly road of the 19th century.

Block is a conjectural historian, and one of some confidence. He says, for example that he has "demonstrated how the game of rounders could not have been baseball's progenitor." But his evidence is always modest and limited. It consists of passages in a few books that refer (usually briefly) to some ball game or another; or of a picture that is almost always ambiguous; and often, and most typically, of old descriptions of how games are played.

Block says that the earliest references to rounders don't appear till 1828. Since we know that games resembling English base-ball were around much earlier in America, rounders can't be the direct ancestor. But how can the reference to a game in children's books be a measure of whether or not kids were playing the game? And even if people first used the name "rounders" in 1828—and who knows that?—why should the name be the criterion of whether the game existed?

Block likes descriptions of games in old books, and often mistakes them for rules. One of his appendices prints a list of 21 early rulebooks of baseball clubs, and I think the emergence of such rulebooks from the late 1830s to the 1860s formally identifies the beginnings of American baseball. That is why the Doubleday legend is not so crazy. Folks may have been playing baseball in Cooperstown at just about the time institutions were codifying how sporting contests using bats, balls, and bases ought to take place. But descriptions of how young people might play a game in some piece of literature are different from rules. The descriptions are just some author's opinion, or instruction, or advice. They may tell us how to play a game, but they don't legislate; they don't constrain players.

Consider trap-ball, a game that Block writes about and that was around from the 1400s. The player with a bat places a ball on the ground in a "trap," which is a device for elevating the ball into the air. In different versions of the game players compete to see who can hit the ball the farthest, or hit in a certain spot, or get the most hits that others do not catch. Can you play trap-ball without a bat? Well, I would think so—players could use their hands or fists to hit the ball (as in handball, or pimple ball). Suppose the trap breaks. Couldn't you play the game even without the trap? If you throw the ball up with one hand, and try to hit it with the other holding a bat (as in hitting fungos), you get the same sort of contest; and you get a similar sort of contest if someone throws the ball and you try to hit it far (home run derby). Without the written rules that Block mis-allies to descriptions of games, it is very difficult to pinpoint what is the essence of a game. Is home run derby played with a pitching machine—the latest version of a trap—a descendent of 15th-century trap-ball? This is the sort of queer question Block is asking about 17th- and 18th-century ball games when he has so little evidence and no rules.

Imagine a ball game that we can easily visualize in contrast to baseball. It has three bases and a home plate. There are three players on a side, with a steady pitcher. He also covers the plate on some plays, since there is no catcher and no bunting. There are no walks or stealing. Batters may strike out, but the pitcher does not try to strike them out, but rather to have the batter put the ball into play. If two players are on base, the batter needs not only to get a hit but also to hit sufficiently well to score the lead runner, who is otherwise out. That is, there are no "ghost runners." If there is another player under the age of seven or so, he becomes a steady batter, with a place in each lineup; he cannot strike out, and the ghost runner issue becomes nugatory.

This game is called "Mill Pond Baseball," and with minor variations children and adults have played it in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, for over fifty years. If there are rules, they are not written down, and although I have played the game for twenty years, I have not heard the word "rules" once. Sometimes with two men on, a fielder will yell, "No ghost runners." One time an overly zealous pitcher tried to ring up a six-year-old kid. After the boy failed to hit a third ball, the pitcher shouted, "You're out." One of the fielders cried, "He can't strike out," and that was that.

If there are rules, might they not be inscribed in the hearts of the players? But even this is not correct, as lovely as it sounds, for new players automatically adjust to the game without being informed of "rules," or having any writing in their hearts.

And the game is called Mill Pond Baseball not because of the conventions of play, but because of the contours of the field. Errors are often made because balls hit a rock or take unpredictable hops, or because a player falls in a declivity or even a hole where a tree has once stood. When players excuse their poor performance, they shake their heads and exclaim: "Mill Pond Baseball!" They are designating the dubious quality of the playing surface on the field where they play.

The question of written rules that players must follow is central. Without them it is much harder to define what distinguishes one game from another, or speak intelligently about the metamorphosis of one game into another. Surely the discovery of descriptions in children's books does not obligate players, or determine when games were first played. Didn't the Mill Pond game exist before I wrote about it? Wouldn't it have existed even had I not the opportunity to write this review? Couldn't it be played with very different conventions?

More important, what is going on in this game and its variants is not something you can get at by looking at portrayals in books. The evidence does not yield what we need for the historical study of what is profound and deep about baseball's growth as a recurring social celebration. David Block obviously loves baseball, and his book is in many ways a labor of love, helpful in enabling historians to talk about the evolution of bat and ball amusements. But people's games of the early modern period (and after) fundamentally differ from organized sports, and the key difference is the existence of a rulebook that some powerful institutionalized group has authorized. Block is looking for origins that may not have existed. I also think that despite his affection for the game, he has missed in his search one crucial component of what made baseball endure—its emergence as a communal ritual.

Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has won four different teaching awards. He is the author most recently of Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger, just out from Princeton University Press.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.