My brother Rick and I grew up in a time and place ideally suited to the formation of lifelong baseball fans. The time was the 1950s and early 1960s; the place was Pomona, California, just a bit east of Los Angeles. The Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958; I had my 10th birthday that June and Rick turned 8 in December.
In the 1950s, boys like us could be found playing catch or over-the-line (when only a handful of players were available) or Wiffle ball in the backyard or sandlot games all over town. Now well into my 70s, and long transplanted to Wheaton, Illinois, I still see children playing some form of baseball here or there, but the everyday seasonal presence of the game is much diminished. That’s one massive change. “National pastime”? Not so much today. The MLB’s game and fandom, of course, are radically different from what they were in the 1950s, let alone the 1920s or the 1880s.
This is one melancholy part of the background for why the best baseball books are, now, often backward-looking histories of the sport. Of all the books published in any given year, precious few are honored with a 20th anniversary edition or the equivalent thereof. One of those few is David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, just out from the University of Nebraska Press in time for the 2025 MLB season. This edition includes two new essays by Block and a foreword by the official historian of the MLB, John Thorn, in addition to the original foreword by Tim Wiles (who was then director of research for the National Baseball Hall of Fame) and an expanded annotated “Early Baseball Bibliography” (70 pages long, with entries ranging from 1450 to 1861, itself worth the price of admission).
If you come to this book with an expectation that it will reveal a simple, crisp answer to the question of “who really invented baseball,” you will be disappointed. Many bat-and-ball games flourished in many different parts of the world centuries before Abner Doubleday allegedly “invented” baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. The greatest influences on the formation of baseball as we know it in the United States, Block shows, were from England — though the American game was not a direct descendant of “rounders,” as some authorities have claimed. See Block’s Chapter 2, “Rounders, Schmounders.”
Block’s second chapter features two epigraphs. The first is from Henry Chadwick (writing in 1860): “Base ball is derived … from the English game of rounders.” The second is from Robert W. Henderson in 1939: “Baseball … is the descendant … directly of the English game of rounders.” Block, however, sets out to show that “Baseball from rounders is an impossibility!” He makes his case in eight pages, witty, concise, and entirely persuasive. It’s a superb example of genuine critical thinking, much in demand today as always.
When you return to a book that you did not merely enjoy on first acquaintance but marveled at, there is often in the background a bit of apprehension. Will it disappoint on renewed acquaintance? I’m happy to report that such was not the case here. But I have to add that when I recommended the first edition to a fellow lover of baseball and books about baseball some time ago, he was nonplussed; he didn’t even finish it. He found Block full of himself, prone to going on and on about “trivia” and so on. For my part, I find the author’s mix of relentless intellectual pursuit, extraordinary research skills (Block was a computer systems analyst who took early retirement in order to pursue his subject), sublime common sense, and dry wit to be irresistible.
John Wilson is senior editor of the Marginalia Review of Books.