How did baseball, as we know it, come to be? It’s a deceptively simple question, but one that even someone like myself — who enjoys baseball and history and baseball history — can easily overlook. For me, even after the claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball was easily tossed aside as fiction, the question lingered but mostly went unexamined. Baseball is our national pastime and it grew out of cricket or rounders or some other game the founders brought over from the Old Word, right?
Thomas W. Gilbert is a bit more curious than I, and he decided that the general idea, that vague notion of where baseball came from was not enough.