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A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball: The Game on the Field, Volume 1
As befits a game traditionally passed from one generation to the next, baseball has always had a special reverence for origins. Claims of being first with any element of the game are disputed with fervor and passion. When the octogenarian Fred Goldsmith died in 1939, a headline proclaimed, 'Goldsmith Dies Insisting He Invented Curve Ball'; Fred Goldsmith understood the secret of immortality. Yet while countless thousands of words have been spilled on the subject of baseball “firsts,” there has been no definitive source for the settlement of disputes. Peter Morris's endlessly fascinating A Game of Inches has now arrived to fill the void. Impeccably researched and engagingly written, this treasure trove will surprise, delight, and educate even the most knowledgeable fan by dispelling cherished myths and revealing the source of many of baseball's features that we now take for granted. The scope of A Game of Inches is encyclopedic, with nearly a thousand entries that illuminate the origins of items ranging from catchers' masks to hook slides to intentional walks to cork-center baseballs. But this is much more than just a reference guide. Award-winning author Peter Morris explains the context that led each new item to emerge when it did, and chronicles the often surprising responses to these innovations. Of few books can it genuinely be said that once you start reading, it's hard to put it down―but A Game of Inches is one of them. It belongs in the pantheon of great baseball books, and will give any reader a deeper appreciation of why baseball matters so much to Americans. (A companion volume, , was published in the fall of 2006.)
- GenresBaseballSportsNonfiction
560 pages, Hardcover
Published March 23, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 22, 2019
Review title: America's game
NFL football is unquestionably America's favorite sport, but baseball, from its deep historical roots to its obsession with data and its evolution by rule making and the occasional break-the-rules rebels,remains America's game. While the eyeballs and dollars that follow the NFL are mind-bogglingly huge, baseball stays in the heart of the American culture with its daily evolving story line from first pitch in April to last out of the World Series. Morris demonstrates and documents that passion in his books The Game of Inches. This volume covers innovations on the field, and a second volume covers off-field innovations in The Game Behind the Scenes.
Baseball's rule book is famously deep and arcane, but Morris shows how it evolved from a short list of just 20 rules written down by the Knickerbocker Club of New York in 1845. From this list barely a page long, Morris spends 500 pages describing the growth of the game through changes not just in rules but in batting, pitching, fielding, and baserunning. In fact, he summarizes the biggest changes in the way the game has been played to this short list of two:
1. Fielding gloves.
2. Dominance of pitching
Defense in the early game was spotty at best, limited both by the bare-handed fielder's reach and control of the ball and the roughly manicured fields that made fielding grounders an adventure. Like many of the innovations, gloves were first mocked as unmanly by the players and unsportsmanlike by traditionalists. Nearly every innovation Morris documents was greeted by a chorus of disapprovals and certainty of the impending apocalypse if the innovation took hold.
While the modern perception is that good pitching beats good hitting and equals good baseball, in fact in the early game pitchers were just supposed to feed the ball to hitters to initiate the real action of hitting, running, and scoring. But pitchers quickly started to dominate the game and the rules makers started a losing battle to try to reduce their influence. Since that time the equipment, athletes, and rules have resulted in eras alternating between low scoring (the 20 years of the dead ball era around the turn of the 20th century and the pitcher dominated decade of the 1960s) and offensive domination (Babe Ruth's 1920s and the 20 years of the steroid era around the turn of the 21st century).
While this volume is about how the game is played on the field, it also contains sections on managing, strategy, equipment, uniforms, and trickery, which dates back to the earliest days of the Knickerbocker rules. And of course, as is only fitting for the game with no clock, Morris concludes with a section on timeouts; interestingly, he believes that fans of those first 19th century clubs would be shocked about how slow-paced today's game is played, a change he attributes in large part as a reaction to the dominance of pitching.
Just like baseball's rule book, Morris uses chapter, section, and subsection headings to organize his material, and while not all follow the exact same format, he generally tries to find the original documented source of the innovation, which this being baseball is of course usually in dispute, and with so many of the sources bring 19th century newspaper reports, often poorly documented. He is very scrupulous in sourcing his evidence--the section on the curve ball is 18 pages long and heavily reference due to its controversial history, even though most sections are two pages or less--and provides an extensive bibliography and an index of names.
Morris is very explicit this is not a book of statistics, records or "firsts"--such as first grand slam or first no-hitter--on the field, for which there are dozens of other sources. But it is a fun source book for fans of the history and growth of the game. This will become a reference shelf item in my library, and I'll be adding the second volume on off-field innovations to my reading wish list.
NFL football is unquestionably America's favorite sport, but baseball, from its deep historical roots to its obsession with data and its evolution by rule making and the occasional break-the-rules rebels,remains America's game. While the eyeballs and dollars that follow the NFL are mind-bogglingly huge, baseball stays in the heart of the American culture with its daily evolving story line from first pitch in April to last out of the World Series. Morris demonstrates and documents that passion in his books The Game of Inches. This volume covers innovations on the field, and a second volume covers off-field innovations in The Game Behind the Scenes.
Baseball's rule book is famously deep and arcane, but Morris shows how it evolved from a short list of just 20 rules written down by the Knickerbocker Club of New York in 1845. From this list barely a page long, Morris spends 500 pages describing the growth of the game through changes not just in rules but in batting, pitching, fielding, and baserunning. In fact, he summarizes the biggest changes in the way the game has been played to this short list of two:
1. Fielding gloves.
2. Dominance of pitching
Defense in the early game was spotty at best, limited both by the bare-handed fielder's reach and control of the ball and the roughly manicured fields that made fielding grounders an adventure. Like many of the innovations, gloves were first mocked as unmanly by the players and unsportsmanlike by traditionalists. Nearly every innovation Morris documents was greeted by a chorus of disapprovals and certainty of the impending apocalypse if the innovation took hold.
While the modern perception is that good pitching beats good hitting and equals good baseball, in fact in the early game pitchers were just supposed to feed the ball to hitters to initiate the real action of hitting, running, and scoring. But pitchers quickly started to dominate the game and the rules makers started a losing battle to try to reduce their influence. Since that time the equipment, athletes, and rules have resulted in eras alternating between low scoring (the 20 years of the dead ball era around the turn of the 20th century and the pitcher dominated decade of the 1960s) and offensive domination (Babe Ruth's 1920s and the 20 years of the steroid era around the turn of the 21st century).
While this volume is about how the game is played on the field, it also contains sections on managing, strategy, equipment, uniforms, and trickery, which dates back to the earliest days of the Knickerbocker rules. And of course, as is only fitting for the game with no clock, Morris concludes with a section on timeouts; interestingly, he believes that fans of those first 19th century clubs would be shocked about how slow-paced today's game is played, a change he attributes in large part as a reaction to the dominance of pitching.
Just like baseball's rule book, Morris uses chapter, section, and subsection headings to organize his material, and while not all follow the exact same format, he generally tries to find the original documented source of the innovation, which this being baseball is of course usually in dispute, and with so many of the sources bring 19th century newspaper reports, often poorly documented. He is very scrupulous in sourcing his evidence--the section on the curve ball is 18 pages long and heavily reference due to its controversial history, even though most sections are two pages or less--and provides an extensive bibliography and an index of names.
Morris is very explicit this is not a book of statistics, records or "firsts"--such as first grand slam or first no-hitter--on the field, for which there are dozens of other sources. But it is a fun source book for fans of the history and growth of the game. This will become a reference shelf item in my library, and I'll be adding the second volume on off-field innovations to my reading wish list.
October 30, 2021
World Series time seemed appropriate to look into this book about baseball, but beware; this isn't a read cover-to-cover work.
For all intents and purposes, it's a reference book.
It does what it claims, going back to as far as the 1830s, if memory serves, to find the source of, for example, who played the first hidden-ball trick, how timeouts have changed, and the development of shin guards,the knuckleball, numbers on uniforms, even uniforms themselves. What Morris does best, though, is detail how various innovations in the game came into common use, were sometimes legislated against or legislated into practice.
The sheer volume of these items he covers impresses. What a baseball fan will find is that while the details in baseball do indeed change frequently, it's the rare rule, the rare piece of equipment, the rare strategy that wasn't tried in some form or another years and years ago, modified, improved and now become an accepted part of the game.
If there's anything to complain about, it would be that Morris details so much about the game before 1900 and in the early part of the 20th century; it just gets tedious after a while. He's to be acknowledged, however, for including such "recent" innovations as the hockey-style catcher's mask and rally caps.
Interspersed throughout are rules that fortunately were weeded out of baseball. One example: a player on base could be called out if, after the batter hit a foul ball, the baserunner did not run back to his base. Who knew?
For all intents and purposes, it's a reference book.
It does what it claims, going back to as far as the 1830s, if memory serves, to find the source of, for example, who played the first hidden-ball trick, how timeouts have changed, and the development of shin guards,the knuckleball, numbers on uniforms, even uniforms themselves. What Morris does best, though, is detail how various innovations in the game came into common use, were sometimes legislated against or legislated into practice.
The sheer volume of these items he covers impresses. What a baseball fan will find is that while the details in baseball do indeed change frequently, it's the rare rule, the rare piece of equipment, the rare strategy that wasn't tried in some form or another years and years ago, modified, improved and now become an accepted part of the game.
If there's anything to complain about, it would be that Morris details so much about the game before 1900 and in the early part of the 20th century; it just gets tedious after a while. He's to be acknowledged, however, for including such "recent" innovations as the hockey-style catcher's mask and rally caps.
Interspersed throughout are rules that fortunately were weeded out of baseball. One example: a player on base could be called out if, after the batter hit a foul ball, the baserunner did not run back to his base. Who knew?
September 24, 2019
This is an amazing amount of information about the early years of baseball. The game used to look alot different. I enjoyed this book, but it was a little to much sometimes. I had to skim some parts.
February 26, 2024
Read for the second time in 2024. Essential for any baseball fan, especially today as we face questions of what the game should look like.
July 4, 2013
If you are interested in turn of the century info, this book is full of it. Many of the things in the game have their roots back in the 19th century, as you would expect... And the author does a good job of keeping it interesting.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews