But that doesn't matter one bit. This is less a baseball book than the intertwinedtales of two remarkable characters. Their story is brash and brawling and delightfullyall-American.

PAUL ADOMITES' next book is Pennsylvania Crude: Boomtowns and Oil Barons. He isalso Book Review Editor of this journal, and can be reached at padomites@embarqmail.com.

In the BeginningReview by Andrew Milner

Baseball (1845-1881): From the Newspaper Accounts, Preston D. Orem. Self pub-lished, 1961. 359 pages.

From the vantage point of the early 21st century, almost half a century since Pre-ston D. Orem's Baseball (1845-1881): From the Newspaper Accounts was privately pub-lished, it is easy to focus on the book's weaknesses: More often than not Orem neverlists the actual newspapers he quotes from, and when he does he omits the date of thearticle in question; it can be difficult to determine where the newspaper quotes leave offand Orem's narrative begins; the introductory "Origin of Baseball" chapter relies toomuch on now discredited sources; readers weaned on such belletrists as Peter Morris andLee Allen may find Orem's workmanlike prose slow-going; and so on. Yet while a read-ing of Orem's book reveals its flaws, it also shows why, imperfections and all, so manybaseball minds admire it.

It is astonishing what Orem was able to accomplish without any semblance oftoday's baseball research infrastructure. A decade before the Society for American Base-ball Research was founded, Orem helped chronicle the earliest years of organized base-ball. Before publication of Macmillan's 1969 Baseball Encyclopedia or David Nemec'sGreat Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Major League Baseball, he attempted a season-by-season account of the earliest years of organized baseball, occasionally including ros-ters with players' ages. Before the opening of the National Baseball Library inCooperstown, Orem crossed the United States to study newspapers from the graduatelibraries at Stanford and UCLA to public libraries in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville,New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. Only one year after the publication of the firstvolume of Harold Seymour's baseball histories, and likely without benefit from Sey-mour's work, Orem wrote extensively about the financial setup of the first National Asso-ciation and National League teams. It's probably healthier to see this book as theequivalent of the 1951 Turkin-Thompson baseball encyclopedia (one of the few refer-ence books Orem acknowledges in his foreword). Orem may not have been the mostcomplete historian of 19th century baseball but, as with Turkin and Thompson, one canconclude Orem deserves credit for being among the very first.

Another obvious conclusion is that Orem simply loved 19th century sportswriting.He devoted much of his text to direct quotes from player profiles (if again these quotesare rarely directly sourced). There is this from an 1868 newspaper article accusing mem-bers of the Cincinnati Red Stockings and Cincinnati Buckeyes of drug use, with uncannyresemblance to 2009 baseball: "Keep on, youth! Drug and barter and bet and bicker andpretty soon there will be a general burst. Then ball playing will be practiced for pleas-ure and the players' business will not be as profitable." From an 1874 New York Herald

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story of a game between two professional clubs of Chicago (then called, sometimes, theGiants) and Brooklyn: "To say the game yesterday was a complete and unmitigated swin-dle upon the spectators but feebly expresses the condition of things and the style of play.From first to last it was a muffing affair and would certainly have disgraced any amateurnines. The school boys who assemble at the Park can and do play infinitely better thandid the 'Giants' or Atlantics and what is more it don't cost 50 cents to see them do iteither."

A wonderful digression from the year-by-year league histories — one of the fewOrem allows himself— is the chapter titled "Ladies of the Diamond of the Year 1879,"apparently taken from a New York World story about an organized game between twowomen's teams near Central Park. Sylvester Wilson, who ran both teams, soberly said,"My object is to start a new thing. To develop the women of America, I am going toopen a field for their physical perfection. There is to be baseball, lacrosse, archery, polo,walking, running, velocipede riding and everything.... It is going to work a revolutionin this country and the world. I tell you this is the biggest thing that has happened forthe women of America." Orem reports that the experiment ended when Wilson "hadbeen arrested for attacks on three of his players, all said to be variety actresses from NewYork."

Not much is known about Preston Orem, the man. He was a prominent figure inbaseball card collecting, before that culture metastasized in the 1970s and 1980s. Thereis no consensus about how Orem spent his final years (he apparently died in 1971), exceptfor the fact that he published single-volume annual extensions to his 1961 book, chron-icling baseball history from 1882-1891. These splendid volumes cover the game in pre-cisely the same delightful if maddening manner of the original hardbound book, exceptthat he credited the New York Clipper, Sporting Life and Sporting News as sources forquotations. Those ten slim volumes — the last of which includes an index to the sectionscovering 1882 forward — have been passed along among baseball historians as if theywere the rarest of jewels, which in a way they are.

Orem's Baseball (1845-1881) is an important document, and with its extensions to1891, it is long overdue for a formal reprinting.

ANDREW MILNER has belonged to SABR for a quarter-century, and wrote for The SABRReview of Books and both editions of The Cooperstown Review. In 2010 he marks his 15th year asa regular book and record reviewer for the Philadelphia City Paper. He lives in the greater Philadel-phia area.

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