Review of "Abner Doubleday: Young Baseball Pioneer," by Montrew Dunham

Review of

Abner Doubleday: Young Baseball Pioneer, by Montrew Dunham

 

Four out of five stars

 The legend that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 has been conclusively proven to be a myth. Fortunately, this book does nothing significant to back up that myth. All that Doubleday is described as doing is playing games that let to the development of baseball and perhaps being one of the people that codified it into one with four sequential bases, a pitcher’s mound and the two sides taking turns after a set number of outs. This really does not differentiate Doubleday from many other boys growing up in the first half of the nineteenth century, similar games were played all over the United States with the rules being fluid, both locally and from place to place.

 Although Doubleday had a distinguished military career, rising to the level of General and fighting at Gettysburg, only eleven pages are devoted to that part of his life. The rest is about his childhood, which could have been the life of millions of energetic boys growing up in the United States at that time. It was a time of exploration, getting dirty, wearing your best clothes on special occasions and playing the most popular games as often as possible with your friends. In that sense, this book is very generic.