A bit dense and academic read, but it is packed with good information. Top notch analysis and a must read for baseball fans.

Unfortunately, this was a DNF for me - two reasons. One, I did read the earlier version that was published 20 years ago and felt it was okay, but more scholarly than one that's good for regular baseball fans. Two, the items that were added in this new edition didn't, in my mind, add a lot of insight into the murky world of investigating baseball's origins. While I was not rating books at the time I read the earlier version, I would have given it 3 stars simply because I finished it. While I did not finish this version, I'll still give it the same 3 stars because it just didn't feel any different.

David Block's Baseball Before We Knew It originally came out 20 years ago, but I had never stumbled upon it until this Twentieth Anniversary Edition.

In this book, Block tackles a few of the lasting beliefs about the origins of baseball. While most are aware that the Abner Doubleday story is complete fiction, Block digs into why and how this story was perpetrated - and why Abner Doubleday in particular was given the nod as baseball's founder. He also tackles the claim that baseball derived from the English game of rounders, offering a fair and straightforward debunking of this claim. He even counters Alexander Cartwright's influence on early baseball.

Fair warning, however, that the book is fairly academic. Nearly half of the pages are an annotated bibliography and it's written almost like a dissertation.

But, if you're a baseball nerd like myself, it's a fascinating read.