Playing First! Early Baseball Lives at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery

Members save 10% on eligible products at checkout with their ID number. John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball: A good idea has many fathers; baseball is such an idea, and an astonishing number of these pioneers came home at last to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Tom Gilbert’s Playing First pays them tribute, not only as ball players but as men in full. It is a brilliant, indispensable book. Author Tom Gilbert writes about this book:Call them baseball’s greatest generation. In the 1850s and 1860s they took a primitive local game and made it into a modern sport that was then exported to the rest of the country. They lived in and around New York City and Brooklyn. An astounding number of them are buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, including Henry Chadwick, pioneer journalist and creator of baseball statistics and the box score; James Creighton, who gave us modern pitching and the strike zone; and Asa Brainard, pitching star of the undefeated 1869 Cincinnati Red St