Book Alert / Spalding's World Tour -- The Epic Adventure That Took Baseball Around the Globe -- And Made it America's Game

Spalding's World Tour -- The Epic Adventure That Took Baseball Around the Globe -- And Made it America's Game by Mark Lamster, Public Affairs '06, $26, 341 pages, ISBN #1-58648-311-0. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w photos sprinkled through text.

Abner Doubleday didn't really invent baseball in Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1839? Say it ain't so, Joe! Actually that dastardly rumor has been around for awhile, but author Mark Lamster throws gasoline on the baseball purists' fire by positing his notion of how the game came to be. No, the game didn't really evolve from the British game of rounders. "It is no more like that game than battledoor and shuttlecock are like rackets and lawn tennis," said Albert Goodwill Spalding.

By 1904, Spalding was world famous -- first as a pre-eminent baseball pitcher, then as a sporting goods manufacturer and finally, as an impressario a la P.T. Barnum. In that year, he set up a commmittee to determine, once and for all, the game's provenance. During its deliberations, the committee received a letter from one Abner Graves of Denver, who claimed to have watched Abner Doubleday draw  a sketch of a baseball diamond in front of a Cooperstown tailor shop.

The fact that Graves turned out to be a wingnut didn't dampen Spalding's determination to enshrine Doubleday as inventor of the game. The psychologist in Mark Lamster now comes to the fore: Spalding did so, in part, because he had lost his dad at an early age and suffered from father-hunger for the rest of his life. Adopting Doubleday as the founder of his chosen sport, even though Spalding had never met him, could create a comforting surrogatacity.

But Spalding, the creator of baseball's National League, had another reason as well. Doubleday had been a Union general during the Civil War and fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, thereby becoming a  genuine war hero. What better battle-standard to raise as Spalding set out to tour the world, creating baseball consciousness?

Spalding's world tour could be told in a long magazine article, but the author has a book to fill, so he mixes the trivial with the exotic to pad his story. The image of 20 baseball players in uniform, poised atop camels on the way to the Egyptian pyramids, is entertaining and evocative, especially when they compete to see who can hit the Sphinx in the eye with a baseball. The listing of the scores and game stats for 57 games played around the world we could do without.

Even though endorsed by President Grover Cleveland, the world tour never made baseball into the world's primary sport -- that would become and remain soccer. For one thing, soccer is more accessible to the average player. Two highly-trained baseball teams dazzling spectators with their skill somehow didn't inspire the foreigners to pick up the game themselves. However, the tour did enhance Spalding's business, creating distributors for his sporting goods in Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand and later in Europe.