Base Ball is a peer-reviewed journal published annually. Offering the best in original research and analysis, the journal promotes study of baseball’s early history, from its protoball roots to 1920, and its rise to prominence within American popular culture.

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: 224
Bibliographic Info: 72 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2013
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7901-6
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1436-6
Imprint: McFarland

Editor’s Note    (John Thorn) 3

Split Season: The National League in 1892 (Charles C. Alexander) 5
The Base Ball Convention of 1857    (Richard Hershberger) 28
Jimmy Callahan: He Covered All the Bases in Chicago    (Art Ahrens) 45
Eadweard Muybridge and Baseball-in-Motion     (Rob Edelman) 62
Bud Fowler—A Knight of the Diamond, a Knight of the Razor    (Hugh MacDougall) 71
Bud Fowler—Playwright    (Hugh MacDougall) 83
William Shuttleworth: The Father of Canadian Baseball    (William Humber) 100
The Sam Barkley Case    (David Ball with David Nemec) 126
A Permanent Institution: The Base Ball Season of 1863    (Robert Tholkes) 143
“A Puritan Sunday”: Base Ball and Blue Laws in Walla Walla, Washington (Terry Gottschall) 154
Frank Merriwell: A Hero for a Bygone Era     (Rob Edelman) 170
Baseball Goes East: The 1876 San Francisco Centennials’ Magical Mystery Tour     (Angus Macfarlane) 185

Author Index 217

• Winner, McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award—David Ball with David Nemec, for “The Sam Barkley Case”
• “one of the more compelling sports-related publications to come along in a great while…unostentatious, solid, and a great read”—Library Journal
• “fascinating.”—Journal of Sport History
• “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