Abner Doubleday had absolutely nothing to do with the invention of baseball.
The game Americans love so much did not descend from the English games of rounders or cricket.
It didn't begin with the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club.
David Block can prove it.
The baseball and history fan started with the intention of compiling a bibliography for others interested in the game's lineage. He does include a 59-page list of books with baseball-related content, but "Baseball" expanded far past that.
"Baseball" traces many of the possible roots of the game and debunks some myths. Is it a thorough history of baseball? No. As Block says, children's games traditionally haven't been considered worth writing about. But "Baseball" does reference writings from 1450 and has illustrations of some type of ball games from the 13th and 14th centuries. Block found a 1796 German text with seven pages of rules for "das englische Base-ball."
Block has gathered and weighed all the evidence he could find about early ball games such as tip-cat, tut-ball, stool-ball or simply "ball." His effort is worth gushing over.
He looks at how and possibly why the Doubleday myth began (national pride, capitalism, a letter from a mentally disturbed man and ties to an occult group in California). He talks about rules prohibiting play near windows. He talks about possible evolutionary paths from people running back and forth between stools to people running around bases.
Readers may disagree with some of the conclusions Block draws. That's fine.
This is a book baseball fans will thoroughly enjoy, but Block also hopes it will recruit more players to the field of research.
Reviewer Carol Edwards is a page designer for The Post and Courier.