
How Baseball Happened
Outrageous Lies Exposed! The True Story Revealed
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Narrated by:
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George Newbern
About this listen
The fascinating, true origin story of baseball - how America’s first great sport developed and how it conquered a nation.
Baseball’s true founders don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. The founders were the hundreds of uncredited amateurs - ordinary people - who played without gloves, facemasks, or performance incentives in the middle decades of the 19th century. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses, and fought against the South in the Civil War.
But that’s not the way the story has been told. The wrongness of baseball history can be staggering. You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn’t. You have read that baseball’s color line was uncrossed and unchallenged until Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. You may have heard Cooperstown, Hoboken, or New York City called the birthplace of baseball, but not Brooklyn. Yet Brooklyn was the home of baseball’s first fans, the first ballpark, the first statistics - and modern pitching.
Baseball was originally supposed to be played, not watched. This changed when crowds began to show up at games in Brooklyn in the late 1850s. We fans weren’t invited to the party; we crashed it. Professionalism wasn’t part of the plan either, but when an 1858 Brooklyn versus New York City series accidentally proved that people would pay to see a game, the writing was on the outfield wall.
When the first professional league was formed in 1871, baseball was already a fully formed modern sport with championships, media coverage, and famous stars. Professional baseball invented an organization, but not the sport itself. Baseball’s amazing amateurs had already done that.
Thomas W. Gilbert’s history is for baseball fans and anyone fascinating by origin stories and American culture.
©2020 Thomas W. Gilbert (P)2020 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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Performance
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Narration
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Story
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Good analysis of game origins but . . .
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Mobituaries
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Story
Mo Rocca has always loved obituaries - reading about the remarkable lives of global leaders, Hollywood heavyweights, and innovators who changed the world. But not every notable life has gotten the send-off it deserves. His quest to right that wrong inspired Mobituaries, his number one hit podcast. Now with Mobituaries, the audiobook, he has gone much further, with all new essays on artists, entertainers, sports stars, political pioneers, founding fathers, and more. Even if you know the names, you’ve never understood why they matter...until now.
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Very good, but.....
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Oscar Charleston
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Story
Buck O'Neil once described him as "Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one". Among experts, he is regarded as the best player in Negro Leagues history. During his prime, he became a legend in Cuba and one of Black America's most popular figures. Yet even among serious sports fans, Oscar Charleston is virtually unknown today.
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Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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A Game of Extremes
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- Unabridged
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Story
Even in a sport as legendary as baseball, players are no exception to the roller-coaster ride of life. Every single person has their own tale of failure, courage, and success, no matter how big or small - it’s when you put them together that you unearth the ultimate underdog story. In A Game of Extremes, you will discover 25 stories of the most exceptional baseball players to this day, revealing a more transparent look at the lives of these famous athletes.
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Only a few new stories, told amateurishly
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The Greatest Summer in Baseball History
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- Unabridged
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In 1973, baseball was in crisis. The first strike in pro sports had soured fans, American League attendance had fallen, and America's team—the Yankees—had lost more games and money than ever. Yet that season, five of the game's greatest figures rescued the national pastime. Hank Aaron riveted the nation with his pursuit of Babe Ruth's landmark home run record in the face of racist threats. George Steinbrenner purchased the Yankees at a bargain basement price and began buying back their faded glory.
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Terrible, Just Terrible.
- By Anonymous User on 06-12-23
By: John Rosengren
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The World's Fastest Man
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- Unabridged
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In the tradition of The Boys in the Boat and Seabiscuit, a fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking but forgotten figure - the remarkable Major Taylor, the Black man who broke racial barriers by becoming the world’s fastest and most famous bicyclist at the height of the Jim Crow era.
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before there was Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson
- By Leo on 07-29-19
By: Michael Kranish
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On the Shoulders of Giants
- My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance
- By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Raymond Obstfeld
- Narrated by: Richard Allen
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In On the Shoulders of Giants, indomitable basketball star and best-selling author and historian Kareem Abdul-Jabbar invites listeners on an extraordinarily personal journey back to his birthplace. He leads us through one of the greatest political, cultural, literary, and artistic movements in our history, revealing the tremendous impact the Harlem Renaissance had on both American culture and his own life.
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The best of both worlds
- By Marianne on 10-06-08
By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and others
What listeners say about How Baseball Happened
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Elizabeth Hopkins
- 08-27-23
Absolutely fascinating history, but audiobook is the wrong format: get the actual book.
This is such a fascinating and well researched book on the history of baseball, and well worth the read. But the audiobook format is not ideal (no shade on the reader, who does a very good job). The story is so complex and has some many moving parts and the chronology jumps around so it’s hard to keep track of all the moving pieces. If there was some sort of accompanying pdf of the chapter and section headings, a timeline of events, a list of some of the main figures — all that would help. Or: just buy the printed book.
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- Drew Cook
- 09-12-24
Worth a read!
A good read for any serious fan of the history of baseball! Hear me well
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- Brian
- 03-04-22
interesting information
great information about the development of baseball from basically a social club for exercising to a paid sport and entertainment venue
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- brendan f kelly
- 04-18-24
Great history of early baseball
First, the narration is first rate. Fantastic. Secondly, the author really knows his stuff. This is a very detailed and interesting story. Sometimes he strays from the topic, sometimes very far from the topic ( Im thinking about waiters strikes, anti Immigrant sentement, and the still unsolved murder of a beautiful and mysterious cigar girl) but even these stories are interesting and colorful. Fantastic book.
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- DavidF
- 03-26-22
Preposterously Amazing
Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. The Cincinnati Red Stockings were not the first ‘professional’ baseball team. I bet the author’s next book is going to tell me the tooth fairy was really my mom and dad.
This is easily one of the Top-Five baseball books ever written. I loved this so much that I didn’t even care about the narrator’s inability to pronounce Massachusetts town names.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Bill
- 01-13-22
superb reading. ate it up in 2 days.
I tore through this in 2 days. Ate it up and loved it. A great historical document. I even enjoyed the author's subtle quips. Completely upends Ken Burns' fairytale story of the origins of baseball and vividly depicts the time and place in which baseball evolved. I think this is a document that'll stand the test of time and could easily be relied upon by others who research or who have in interest in early baseball. I stand and applaud the author. Great work.
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2 people found this helpful