Note: Thank you to NetGalley, University of Nebraska Press, and author David Block for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

The roots of baseball were planted the moment the first cave kid hit a stone with his club.

Baseball Before We Knew It was first published by David Block in 2005. For its 20th anniversary, Block went back and updated the book with new information he had gleaned in the previous twenty years. I can’t compare the two versions since I hadn’t read the original edition.

Block attempts to trace the real roots of baseball. The Abner Doubleday story that most of us grew up with was invented by a man in Colorado and embraced by Albert Spaulding. The name Spaulding is synonymous with sports equipment, and he was determined to make baseball a purely American sport. The Doubleday story fitted what he wanted to believe, but was far from the truth.

Instead, Block traces the game back before there was any organization to try to determine its origins. The answer is, it’s complicated. Pouring through ancient newspapers and books, he charts the mention of baseball back through time. Going by the dates they are discussed in any detail, it also seems that the idea that baseball developed from the British game rounders is also false. It seems the two developed separately from a common ball and bat sports ancestor.

They are all listed here. Games I never heard of are thoroughly described. There was town ball, round ball, and various “cat” games that were all somewhat similar to the modern game of baseball as we know it here in the United States.

The book is thorough but also rather dry. The debunking of the Doubleday myth was interesting, as well as Block’s deep dive into the possible motivation for it. He does an extensive character analysis of all of the principals involved in propping up the myth. Is there a lot of information here? Yes. Is there too much information? Also, yes, but I would add the caveat that this is the definitive book of the history of the game before the Civil War, and Block gives the reader everything he knows. If there’s more information to be found, it hasn’t been discovered yet.

More than half of the book is made up of Block’s bibliography. This is important because this is how he traced the roots of the game. He cites these sources in his discussion of the roots, then addresses them again in the bibliography. He includes what was in each book that was important to understanding the history of the game, and also gives additional information about the possible context for each. One of the most convincing bits of information that baseball was being played long before it was organized in the United States is a German book, printed in 1796, that details how to play “English base-ball.”

This is a book strictly for baseball historians who want to take a deep dive into how the game was developed. Realistically, we’ll never know the actual sequence of events that led to the game as we know it. Block’s quote, which I led off the review with, is the most likely scenario. How we got from cavemen hitting rocks with a club to where we are today is chronicled as much as it can possibly be in Baseball Before We Knew It. Block has done a great job and a tremendous amount of research, but the appeal of this book is pretty narrow. I probably would have stopped reading it were it not for the review. At times, I found it tedious, which is why it took me a good long time to read it. I recommend it to baseball junkies only who really want to take a deep dive into the history of the game.