Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2009)

BACK ISSUE
This is a single back issue only. To order a current subscription, or for more information, please visit the journal’s web page at https://mcfarlandbooks.com/imprint/base-ball-new-research-on-the-early-game/.  Print copies of back issues from volumes 1-6 are available for $29.95.

John Thorn is the author of countless articles on baseball history and has written, co-written, and edited dozens of baseball books, including The Hidden Game of Baseball, Total Baseball, and The Armchair Book of Baseball. He was founding editor of The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History and founding publisher of Total Sports Publishing in 1998. Thorn writes “Play,” a regular column for the VOICES, the semiannual publication of the New York Folklore Society, and appears irregularly in the Boston Globe, New York Times and NYTBR. He serves as a publishing and curatorial consultant to the Museum of the City of New York, with whom he created the recently published coffee-table book New York 400.

Edited by John Thorn
Format: softcover (7 x 10)
Pages: 124
Bibliographic Info:
Copyright Date: 2009
ISSN:
Imprint: McFarland

Editor’s Note      3
Letter to the Editor      5

The National Agreement and Its Discontents: The Difficult Origins and Ragged Development of the Reserve Clause
David Ball      7
Blood and Base Ball
Randall Brown      23
The Union Association: An Unexpected Last Stop
David Nemec      44
Sowing Johnny Appleseeds of Doubt
Monica Nucciarone      53
Base Is Not Always Baseball: Prisoner’s Base from the 13th to the 20th Centuries
Thomas Altherr      67
Baseball and Rounders
Richard Hershberger      81
Everyone Went to Nick’s: High and Low Life in Manhattan’s First Sports Bar
Don Jensen      94
The New York Clipper and Sporting Weeklies of Its Time
John Thorn      107

Book Reviews      114
Peter Mancuso, Bob Bailey and Jerry Casway review DAVID NEMEC’S
The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball      114
Jim Kaplan reviews ANDREW J. SCHIFF’S “The Father of Baseball”      118
Peter Morris reviews JAMES M. EGAN, JR.’S, Base Ball on the Western Reserve      121
Bill Carle reviews CINDY THOMSON and SCOTT BROWN’S Three Finger      122

• “One of the more compelling sports-related publications to come along in a great while…unostentatious, solid, and a great read”—Library Journal
• “The journal both embodies recent trends and provides a forum for expanding upon them. Base Ball thus represents an exciting and important contribution to literature on the sport. John Thorn, a respected historian of early baseball history, is the journal’s editor and Base Ball has a first-rate editorial board and, as a result, already appears poised to be among the finest journals dedicated to the history of sports”—Arete
• “Never comes up short in the quality of its content. In addition to the fine research articles there is a valuable section of book reviews, mostly dedicated to books pertaining to 19th century baseball”—Nineteenth Century Notes
• “An exciting and important contribution to literature on the sport…seeks to chronicle, analyze, and expand our understanding of the game during its long, and seemingly getting longer, pre 1920 phase”—Society for American Baseball Research Bibliography Committee Newsletter.