Baseball: The Early Years

I read this book about ten years ago, and I loved it. It tells you everything you need to know about baseball in its formative years. It certainly isn't for everyone. Seymour is a historian, and he writes like one, getting into every aspect of the game. It's not merely a book about the players, though they do make up a large part of it. There's also much about the owners, the umpires, the rules, the stadiums. It is a comprehensive, well-researched, and very well-written history of the old ball game. This book takes you there.

This book gives great details into baseballs past. The author takes time to descirbe the feelings of both the players and fans on the sideline. At some times the reader may find themselves lost in the baseball time line, but with a little bit of bak tracking and side notes you will find your place in time. I only wish the book went deeper into the player's lives, but the ideal is the establishment of the game. You will set this book down knowing the truth of the game and the men who made it the way it is today. Good Read!!!!!

Aside from the most comprehensive view of early baseball, Harold Seymour provides incredible insight as he takes the reader through every vital detail about the game's heritage. For a book written 40 years ago, it shows the author's masterful foresight of what baseball would, and did, become. Particularly compelling is how he shreds the Abner Doubleday myth before doing so was popular. His compilation and timeless analyses of baseball's sometimes painful adolescence gives the reader a solid baseline for understanding the difficulties that the sport is enduring today. It's fascinating proof that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. Anybody interested in baseball history will want to run right out and get his second volume, "The Golden Age" as soon as they finish this one