Praise for Death in the Strike Zone
A fascinating must-read for baseball history buffs.
Publishers Weekly
Tom Gilbert has invented a brilliant new kind of baseball book, a mystery biography thats a history of an incandescent American folk hero, a masterful study of the physics of pitching, and a survey of the wild, weird 19th century. Because Gilbert is an expert on still-relevant topics like gambling, pitching mechanics, and baseball economics, Death in the Strike Zone is endlessly enlightening. Creighton died young, but Ive never read anything about 19th century baseball thats so alive.
John W. Miller, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Last Manager
Jim Creighton was baseballs first hero, changing the nature of the game even more than Babe Ruth. Tom Gilbert's eye-opening biography celebrates the pitcher's exceedingly brief lifebaseball killed himand unveils long-held mysteries. Death in the Strike Zone provides a peephole into the sporting past of Brooklyn and New York when each was a city all its own.
John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball
With a zest for bringing 19th-century rogues and rowdies to life that recalls Lucy Santes Low Life, Thomas Gilbert's Death in the Strike Zone grapples with the paradox that was James Creighton, at once baseballs first star and yet practically a cipher thanks to his premature death. Gilbert expertly unravels the mysteries around Creightonwhere he came from, how he dominated hitters and set amateur baseball on a course towards professionalization, how he met such a tragic endfleshing out our knowledge of an important, and underappreciated figure in the development of the national pastime.
Jay Jaffe, Senior Writer, FanGraphs
Praise for Thomas W. Gilberts How Baseball Happened
Winner of the Casey Award: Best Baseball Book of the Year
Explores the conditions and factors that begat the game in the 19th century and turned it into the national pastime. The book explains how almost all conventional wisdom about baseballs origins and formative years is wrong. A delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat. Wall Street Journal
Best gift book of the year! Gilbert digs deep into baseball history to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the origins of the American pastime. He contends that neither Abner Doubleday, Alexander Cartwright nor Henry Chadwick fathered the game but rather it was originated by a group of amateurs in New York City. New York Post
Baseball has fabricated its own history several times over, but its origin story matters. In this entertaining narrative, Gilbert shows how the game was developed by amateurs, in part to introduce healthier habits and the sporting life in a country that didn't really have either. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Brilliantly gathers hidden treasure long buried in newspaper accounts and diaries to present a rich and nuanced picture of American baseball as it grew and blossomed. Along the way, he explodes myths that have long shaped our understanding of this great game. This is a tart and funny trip through the raucous and aspiring culture that shaped baseball, with its volunteer firefighters, urban professionals, bloodstained butchers, and brawling gamblers. Edward Achorn, author of Every Drop of Blood: The Summer of Beer and Whiskey and Fifty-nine in 84
A lively and often funny account of how baseball became THE national sport. At once irreverent and loving, Gilbert explodes baseball's founding myths while painting a rich portrait of a forgotten America. For baseball lovers and history buffs alike. Robert Kagan, author of The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World
A brilliant new approach to our game and its author tells a hundred stories you havent heard before. John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball
