Death in the Strike Zone: The Mystery of America’s First Baseball Hero

Sports historian Gilbert (How Baseball Happened) delivers a probing biography of James Creighton, baseball’s first celebrity athlete, whose short-lived career ended with his sudden death in 1862 at age 21. Gilbert exposes the curious and corrupt chain of events that doomed Creighton to relative obscurity in the annals of sports history. Creighton, Gilbert alleges, was covertly compensated for playing in what was then an amateur sport, and it was his exceptional talent as a pitcher that led him to be literally worked to death. As a mid-19th-century wave of immigration prompted residents to flee Manhattan, baseball’s birthplace, for Brooklyn, they brought the sport with them, forming pick-up teams like the Atlantics and the Excelsiors. Gilbert argues that Creighton, the son of a Tammany Hall lackey, was intentionally relocated from Manhattan to Brooklyn at age 16 as a way of surreptitiously improving the Excelsiors’ roster. Local businessmen invested in the sport then attempted to spread its popularity beyond New York by sending the Excelsiors on exhibition tours; it was during one such game that Creighton began to complain of pain, dying days later of apparent internal injuries. Gilbert highlights that, despite the work Creighton did to popularize the sport, the Baseball Hall of Fame doesn’t recognize players of the “Amateur Era,” meaning he has gone relatively unrecognized. It’s a fascinating must-read for baseball history buffs. (Mar.)