Baseball in the Garden of Eden Quotes

“Reflecting on the appeal of history in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, heroine Catherine Morland comments, “I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” Indeed. And in no field of American endeavor is invention more rampant than in baseball, whose whole history is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community, and fair play. The game’s epic feats and revered figures, its pieties about racial harmony and bleacher democracy, its artful blurring of sport and business—all of it is bunk, tossed up with a wink and a nudge. Yet we love both the game and the flimflam because they are both so . . . American.”
― John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game