The Great Match (1877) and Our Base Ball Club (1884) were the two earliest novels to incorporate baseball as a major plot element, and each is reprinted here for the first time since its original publication. Edited and introduced by baseball scholars Trey Strecker and Geri Strecker, this volume, the tenth in the McFarland Historical Baseball Library, is for anyone with an interest in early baseball and its place in the nineteenth century popular imagination.

Trey Strecker is an assistant professor of English and sports studies at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He is the editor of the scholarly journal NINE: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture and has published two anthologies.

Geri Strecker is an assistant professor of English at Ball State University. She is writing a biography of Hall of Famer Oscar Charleston and another book on baseball and diplomacy in the Philippines prior to World War I.

Anonymous and Noah Brooks

Series Editors Gary Mitchem and Mark Durr

Format: softcover (6 x 8)
Pages: 308
Bibliographic Info: 14 illustrations
Copyright Date: 2010
pISBN: 978-0-7864-4406-9
eISBN: 978-0-7864-5736-6
Imprint: McFarland
Series: The McFarland Historical Baseball Library

SERIES EDITORS’ NOTE      ix

INTRODUCTION BY TREY STRECKER and GERI STRECKER      xi

The Great Match, and Other Matches (1877) by Anonymous      1

Our Base Ball Club and How It Won the Championship (1884) by Noah Brooks      161

• “One of the best but least-heralded developments in the recent history of baseball literature was the inauguration of the McFarland Historical Baseball Library in 2003”—Spitball
• “invaluable McFarland Historical Baseball Library series”—Edward Achorn, The Providence Journal
• “readers…might be drawn in by the baseball…but they should stay for the glimpses of how our modern sport culture developed in the late nineteenth century…. [T]hree cheers and a tiger for all involved in the book’s production.”—Scott Peterson, Sport Literature Association; “three cheers”—SABR Bibliography Committee Newsletter