Baseball: The Early Years

"It is both the first and the best. Seymour wrote a thesis at Cornell – I think it was published in 1956. And the first volume of the Oxford University three-volume series on baseball, The Early Years , which was product of Harold’s collaboration with his wife Dorothy, was based on the thesis. The thesis focused on baseball through 1891 but in his book he went to 1903. The year that the American League and the National League faced each other in a world series for the first time, 1903 is regarded as the launch of baseball’s modern era. Seymour’s work was brilliant and original in its focus on off-the-field activity. The Seymours showed that baseball was filled with hypocrisy and greed and all of the things that we love about America. Their work was central in making me a historian of baseball. It helped convince me that having left a doctoral programme in English Literature, in which I was writing a thesis on a 17th-century metaphysical poet named George Herbert, that it might not be such a steep fall into disgrace to go from that to being a baseball writer. That one could write seriously about baseball, not merely tell funny stories. That was the impact of Seymour’s book on me. I think his great contribution was to convince other serious-minded individuals in the years to come that there was a lot left undone. If someone were to ask me, what should be the first baseball book I should read to understand the history of the game, I would point them to Seymour – and to Lawrence Ritter, another of my choices. They were not exactly Ozzie and Harriet. The outdated idea that the wife should be subservient to the husband in all matters, even in professional matters, appears to have had a toxic effect on their collaboration at least. Dorothy has had something of a steep climb to convince scholars such as myself – and I am convinced – that she was a material collaborator and a co-author who deserves full credit."