New Book of the Week (October 20, 2008)

To enjoy as a companion to the World Series:

On the New Book Shelf in the Library
Call Number: GV 863 .A1 M644 2008

But Didn't We Have Fun? The Pioneer Age of Baseball
By Peter Morris

Author's Description: I’m very excited about my new book, But Didn’t We Have Fun?. It tells the story of the first generation of ballplayers -- the men who saw baseball transformed from a boy’s game into a professional sport -- in an entirely new way. In fact, what I’ve tried to do as much as possible is to give these pioneers the opportunity to tell their own story for the first time. I’ve collected dozens of the previously unpublished or unavailable reminiscences of these earliest ballplayers and woven them together to bring those extraordinary years back to life.

Standing alone, these men’s recollections can be difficult to follow -- after all, they were addressing their contemporaries and did not have twenty-first-century readers in mind. And even if they had, they could not possibly have anticipated how much the game they loved has changed and grown. So while compiling But Didn’t We Have Fun? I had to be careful to put everything in context and to explain or leave out obscure references. I also had to leave out a lot of names and dates and places that would simply have made the essential parts of their stories more difficult to follow.

What is left is, I think, an extraordinary story -- about how much work these men put in to make the baseballs and the playing fields that made the game possible, about how much belonging to a baseball club meant to them, about what they thought of the changing rules and the coming of professionalism, about the special moments on the diamond that stuck with them for the rest of their lives, and most of all of how they came to love baseball. Best of all, it’s all true, or at least true in the way any person’s honest recollections are -- the details may get confused over time, but their essence becomes clearer. It was a privilege for me to be able to help these men tell their tales.