Good, but not great, history of the origins of baseball. Block uncovers a lot of ancient antecedents and early versions of baseball and references to the game. His theory on its evolution and descent is spot on, I think. The book is well cited with a neat set of bibliographies at the end. This book is more of a historiography of the history of baseball. Thus, the book meanders, is repetitive, and disjointed. A chronological rendering of the evolution of baseball from its antecedents would have been nice, but instead we jump from one theory to another, back and forth over time. It leads to a bit of a jumble. (Also, a superfluous swipe at Bush and the Iraq War in the preface/intro was off-putting.) ( )

Being an exhaustive examination of bat-and-ball games from around Europe which attempts to identify evolutionary ancestors to America' s national pastime. Although the author dips his toe into the more familiar controversy between the Doubleday myth and. Henry Chadwick's rounders theory--he rejects both, the latter on the somewhat pettifogging grounds that he asserts that 'rounders' was merely a regional slang synonym for older games which were named base-ball in all other times and places, the heart of the book examines games from earlier centuries. This is an academic book, and the author makes no effort to write in an interesting style. It is disjointed and reads almost like a volume of contributed papers. It's an impressive body of research, albeit one which is tarnished a bit around the edges by the author's too-vehement dismissal of conclusions with which he disagrees. The book will move study in the area forward and will be of interest to early baseball obsessives. ( )