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: 184
Bibliographic Info: photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2014
pISBN: 978-0-7864-9529-0
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1748-0
Imprint: McFarland

Editor’s Note (John Thorn) 3

An Early Baseball Play and an Early Baseball Novel: Who Wrote ’em? (Rob Edelman) 5
Searching for James Creighton (Thomas W. Gilbert) 17
Return to Conventional Wisdom on Candy Cummings (David Arcidiacono) 35
The Oldest Trick in the Book (Bill Deane) 47
Broke Up by the Dutch Fight (John Zinn) 55
1873, Waverly Fairgrounds, and the Resolutes of Elizabeth (David Krell) 70
A Deadball Era Whodunit: The Unsolved 1911 Murder of Indianapolis Indians Pitcher Lefty Craig (William F. Lamb) 76
The Mystery of Horace B. Phillips (Brock Helander) 85
The Dismantling of the National League’s First Dynasty: Phase 1 (David Ball with David Nemec) 104
Rube Waddell’s Theater of the Absurd: The Hilarious Histrionics
of Baseball’s Hall of Fame Flake (Dan ­O’Brien) 126
The Antebellum Growth and Spread of the New York Game (Richard Hershberger) 134
Broken Windows: Springfield, Massachusetts (Brian Turner) 150
The “X” Letters (Robert Tholkes) 168

• “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.