How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed! the True Story Revealed

How Baseball Happened is a brilliant new approach to our game and its author tells a hundred stories you haven't heard before. It is my honor to invite you to enter into his world.

John Thorn
Official Historian,
Major League Baseball

Visitors to Cooperstown are in the wrong place. Baseball wasn't born in a meadow but 200 miles away in noisy, in-your-face New York City. No one invented baseball. And its origins are not all that mysterious. They are misunderstood, forgotten and buried under deliberate lies, most of them made up to market the game. If you want to know what really happened, this is the book for you.
Baseball was created by people willing to risk broken fingers to catch a ball without gloves. It was made by spectators who showed up, uninvited, to watch. It was made and shaped by the rising popularity of newspapers and the new middle class, by hucksters and hustlers, by a rivalry between New York and Brooklyn, by teams that sprang up in cities from Philadelphia to Cincinnati to Boston until baseball became our first true national sport.

The fascinating, true, origin story of baseball -- how America's first great sport developed and how it conquered a nation. "A brilliant new approach to our game and its author tells a hundred stories you haven't heard before. It is my honor to invite you to enter into his world."--John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball

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 have been told that the clean, corporate 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were baseball's first professional club. Not true. They weren't the first professionals; they weren't all that clean, either. 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.

• Breaks new ground in the story of how baseball became baseball. A fascinating origin story.


• Endorsed by the Official Historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn


• First book to clearly call bullstuff on the legends of baseball history--not just as harmless mistakes but as deliberate lies told to market the game.


• First book to tell the real story--of interest to baseball buffs and people interested in how things happen


• Illustrated with 30 black-and-white photographs, maps, and illustrations.

The fascinating, true, story of baseball's origins. "Explores the conditions and factors that begat the game in the 19th century and turned it into the national pastime....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

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 have been told that the clean, corporate 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were baseball's first professional club. Not true. They weren't the first professionals; they weren't all that clean, either. 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 history, American culture, and how great things began.