Description: This hefty volume combines author commentary with first-hand accounts, documenting the spread of baseball in and around Cleveland, home to one of the earliest and most active baseball scenes outside of the eastern seaboard. Ordered chronologically and then geographically by town, chapters follow the games rise from the earliest reports on ball in 1841, to the era of loosely organized, town-to-town rivalries and semipro clubs, and finally up through the establishment of the professional, and eventually major league, sport.
Brief description: James M. Egan, Jr., lives in Ohio.
Review Quotes: "exhaustively detailed...a glorious success. Any serious baseball fan would love to read [this book]. It's a home run of research and reporting...and reading."-Ohioana Quarterly; "Egan ... has done an incredible amount of research. His exhaustive culling of difficult-to-find small-town newspapers will be invaluable to researchers of early baseball in the Greater Cleveland area."-Journal of Sport History.