Our Base Ball Club And How It Won the Championship

by Noah Brooks

Noah Brooks' Our Base Ball Club and How It Won the Championship (1884) is the first novel devoted entirely to baseball and an excellent example of local colour fiction popular during the time. Throughout the story, intense town rivalry forces the Catalpa, Illinois, community and its ball club to confront game-throwing players and to enter the debate about amateur versus professional teams. In his introduction to the book, Al Spalding champions Brooks' vivid portrayal of the ups and downs, the trials and the triumphs of a base ball club, concluding that while nothing is really needed to popularize the game, I am sure the story will commend itself to every lover of pure and wholesome literature. Volume editors Trey Strecker and Geralyn Strecker provide a publication history, an analysis of the text and background on baseball in the late 1800s. An appendix includes the two baseball chapters from Brooks' earlier novel The Fairport Nine.

205 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2006

About the author

On the editorial staff of the New York Times and New York Tribune.

Reviews

[Matthew Guerra · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story concerns a small town in Illinois organizing a base ball club to challenge for the championship. Somehow they manage to win it after playing fewer than two dozen games. The final third of the book is devoted to play-by-play accounts of the championship series. Any drama these games might have had is sapped away by the chapter headings and the title of the book, which give away the ending. A few events occur outside the "Diamond Field," but they have no real import nor are they ever resolved. The characters exist solely to move the story along.

Recommended for those interested in 19th-century base ball who are curious about the way the game was played at the time.