Base Ball, Vol. 9

Base Ball is a peer-reviewed book series published annually. Offering the best in original research and analysis, it promotes study of baseball’s early history, from its protoball roots to 1920, and its rise to prominence within American popular culture.
Prior to Volume 10, Base Ball was published as Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game. This is a back issue of that journal.

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: 200
Bibliographic Info: photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2015
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7905-4
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2139-5
Imprint: McFarland

Editor’s Note (John Thorn) 3

A Base Ball Krank’s Guide to Madison Square (Don Jensen) 5
18791/2: Baseball’s West Coast Postseason (Angus Macfarlane) 28
Morgan Bulkeley: Founding Father or Figurehead? (David Krell) 45
“A totally glorious, exhilarating game”: Baseball’s Emergence as the National Pastime (Bruce Allardice) 53
The Boys of Summer’s Winter Pastime: Major Leaguers’ Participation in Indoor Baseball, 1887–1917 (Laura A. Purcell) 69
Ashley Lloyd: A Modest but Constructive Presence in Baseball’s Executive Chambers (Bill Lamb) 82
The Making of Baseball’s Magna Carta (John Thorn) 90
Analysis of the “Laws of Base Ball” (Theodore A. Frank, Jr.) 101
Challenging Sunday Baseball in Old Chicago (Art Ahrens) 130
Pre–1920 Baseball Cartoons and Comic Art: A Brief Survey (Rob Edelman) 145
Andy Leonard Diary of 1874 England Tour 159
The Adoption of the Fly Game, 1856–1865 (Richard Hershberger) 185

• “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