But that doesn't matter one bit.

This is less a baseball book than the intertwined tales of two remarkable characters. Their story is brash and brawling and delightfully all-American.
PAUL ADOMITES' next book is Pennsylvania Crude: Boomtowns and Oil Barons. He is also Book Review Editor of this journal, and can be reached at padomites@embarqmail.com.

In the Beginning
Review by Andrew Milner Baseball (1845-1881): From the Newspaper Accounts, Preston D. Orem. Self published, 1961. 359 pages. From the vantage point of the early 21st century, almost half a century since Preston D. Orem's Baseball (1845-1881): From the Newspaper Accounts was privately published, it is easy to focus on the book's weaknesses: More often than not Orem never lists the actual newspapers he quotes from, and when he does he omits the date of the article in question; it can be difficult to determine where the newspaper quotes leave off and Orem's narrative begins; the introductory "Origin of Baseball" chapter relies too much on now discredited sources; readers weaned on such belletrists as Peter Morris and Lee Allen may find Orem's workmanlike prose slow-going; and so on. Yet while a reading of Orem's book reveals its flaws, it also shows why, imperfections and all, so many baseball minds admire it. It is astonishing what Orem was able to accomplish without any semblance of today's baseball research infrastructure. A decade before the Society for American Baseball Research was founded, Orem helped chronicle the earliest years of organized baseball. Before publication of Macmillan's 1969 Baseball Encyclopedia or David Nemec's Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Major League Baseball, he attempted a seasonby-season account of the earliest years of organized baseball, occasionally including rosters with players' ages. Before the opening of the National Baseball Library in Cooperstown, Orem crossed the United States to study newspapers from the graduate libraries at Stanford and UCLA to public libraries in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. Only one year after the publication of the first volume of Harold Seymour's baseball histories, and likely without benefit from Seymour's work, Orem wrote extensively about the financial setup of the first National Association and National League teams. It's probably healthier to see this book as the equivalent of the 1951 Turkin-Thompson baseball encyclopedia (one of the few reference books Orem acknowledges in his foreword). Orem may not have been the most complete historian of 19th century baseball but, as with Turkin and Thompson, one can conclude Orem deserves credit for being among the very first. Another obvious conclusion is that Orem simply loved 19th century sportswriting. He devoted much of his text to direct quotes from player profiles (if again these quotes are rarely directly sourced). There is this from an 1868 newspaper article accusing members of the Cincinnati Red Stockings and Cincinnati Buckeyes of drug use, with uncanny resemblance to 2009 baseball: "Keep on, youth! Drug and barter and bet and bicker and pretty soon there will be a general burst. Then ball playing will be practiced for pleasure and the players' business will not be as profitable." From an 1874 New York Herald 118 Base Ball^ll (Spring 2010)

story of a game between two professional clubs of Chicago (then called, sometimes, the Giants) and Brooklyn: "To say the game yesterday was a complete and unmitigated swindle upon the spectators but feebly expresses the condition of things and the style of play. From first to last it was a muffing affair and would certainly have disgraced any amateur nines. The school boys who assemble at the Park can and do play infinitely better than did the 'Giants' or Atlantics and what is more it don't cost 50 cents to see them do it either." A wonderful digression from the year-by-year league histories one of the few Orem allows himself is the chapter titled "Ladies of the Diamond of the Year 1879," apparently taken from a New York World story about an organized game between two women's teams near Central Park. Sylvester Wilson, who ran both teams, soberly said, "My object is to start a new thing. To develop the women of America, I am going to open a field for their physical perfection. There is to be baseball, lacrosse, archery, polo, walking, running, velocipede riding and everything.... It is going to work a revolution in this country and the world. I tell you this is the biggest thing that has happened for the women of America." Orem reports that the experiment ended when Wilson "had been arrested for attacks on three of his players, all said to be variety actresses from New York." Not much is known about Preston Orem, the man. He was a prominent figure in baseball card collecting, before that culture metastasized in the 1970s and 1980s. There is no consensus about how Orem spent his final years (he apparently died in 1971), except for the fact that he published single-volume annual extensions to his 1961 book, chronicling baseball history from 1882-1891. These splendid volumes cover the game in precisely the same delightful if maddening manner of the original hardbound book, except that he credited the New York Clipper, Sporting Life and Sporting News as sources for quotations. Those ten slim volumes the last of which includes an index to the sections covering 1882 forward have been passed along among baseball historians as if they were the rarest of jewels, which in a way they are. Orem's Baseball (1845-1881) is an important document, and with its extensions to 1891, it is long overdue for a formal reprinting.
ANDREW MILNER has belonged to SABR for a quarter-century, and wrote for The SABR Review of Books and both editions of The Cooperstown Review. In 2010 he marks his 15th year as a regular book and record reviewer for the Philadelphia City Paper. He lives in the greater Philadelphia area.

Reviews

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