Baseball Fever: Early Baseball in Michigan (2003, University of Michigan Press)

To a greater or lesser extent, each of my books has been written because I was disappointed that somebody else hadn’t written it. This was especially true of my first book, Baseball Fever: Early Baseball in Michigan. I became fascinated with the early days of baseball in Michigan, but was frustrated that there were no sources that could answer my many questions. The result was this history of baseball in Michigan from its first tentative appearances as a child’s game in the 1830 and ’40s up until the fully professional era began in the 1870s. It was an amazingly rapid transition for baseball, and I was blessed with a wonderful cast of characters and teams to write about. I was also lucky to be close to the Library of Michigan in Lansing, an extraordinary repository for early newspapers. So I painstakingly went through all of them and pieced the story together. Writing it was a still bigger challenge, and it took me a long time to find the right publisher, but I was very fortunate that editor Kelly Sippell of the University of Michigan Press liked the idea and helped a novice writer see it through to completion.

AWARDS

Baseball Fever was the recipient of the 2004 Seymour Medal as the best baseball book of 2003.  It was also selected as a 2004 Michigan Notable Book by the Michigan Department of History, Arts and Libraries.

HOW TO PURCHASE

All of my books can be purchased from the publisher (in this case, University of Michigan Press), or from on-line booksellers such as amazon.com, or from your local bookseller.  If they don't have it in stock, they’ll be glad to order it for you.  Baseball Fever is available in either a hardcover or soft-cover edition, but the hard-cover edition is quite pricy and does not have a dust jacket.

POSTSCRIPT

A whole chapter of the book was devoted to a major national 1867 tournament held in Detroit, where the winning team received a championship bat.  To my amazement, a year or two after the book came out I heard from the staff at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village that they had been contacted by someone who had found that bat in an attic in California.  All the details of the bat matched the descriptions in my book and the museum ended up acquiring the bat.  It was incredible for me to see it.   

REVIEWS

“The book is a marvel of scholarship; a regional history of the game told in unprecedented detail and with a fan’s enthusiasm. As a researcher, Morris is tireless. No game played in Michigan during his period of study, be it professional, club, recreational, or youth, seems to have escaped his attention … In lesser hands, so much accumulated detail could make for a stupendously tedious, not to mention parochial, book. But to Morris’s credit, Baseball Fever is, for the most part, an engaging read with implications that extend beyond the confines of the Wolverine State.  For Morris, Michigan becomes something like the deep ice borings of an arctic geologist: a core that, if read with proper care, can illuminate a far broader history. ‘Precisely because Michigan was never at the forefront of baseball’s development,’ he writes, ‘examining how its residents became passionate about the game will help us understand a vital and forgotten part of baseball history.’  The result is a provocative account of the game’s progress that summarizes much of the latest scholarship, offers a wealth of new insights, and challenges many of the assumptions historians have either clung to or taken on faith for decades … Baseball Fever is peppered with compelling observations, and these nuggets, interspersed as they are in Morris’s text – some are even found in the notes – reward the reader who pushes through his Michigan-centric narrative.” Mark Lamster, Nineteenth Century Notes

“Lovers of baseball, or of things Michigan, will enjoy this book.” Steve Begnoche, Ludington News

“Peter Morris has accomplished a major feat with Baseball Fever: By using one geographic area as a mirror, he reflects the early history of the game for the entire nation.” Baseball historian Paul Dickson

“Peter Morris is able to demonstrate what is an essential truth: that Americans’ attachment to their national pastime is fundamentally and forever local. . . . The book is a marvel of scholarship and synthesis.” Baseball historian John Thorn

“This book uses pre-National League baseball as a prism through which to see the dovetailing of emerging Gilded Age values with changing views about leisure and play. This story would be lost had Morris tried to tackle it on a scale any larger than that of a state, because the nuances of local competition and of the ebb and flow of popularity would be buried under the story of emerging professional teams, as is the case with most histories of baseball during this period. The book might have been shortened by omitting the lists of players or by summarizing the results of yearly tournaments, but it would have lost its appeal as a closely detailed case study of the way in which baseball became the ‘national pastime.’” – Jeffrey Smith, Indiana Magazine of History

“Throughout Baseball Fever, Morris carefully examines baseball’s “unique texture of a boy’s game peeking out from behind an elaborate adult superstructure” as he charts the game’s transition from a social event to an athletic contest. In the course of his study, Morris offers provocative insights on the use of gloves, the positioning of the catcher, the social function of muffin games, the enclosure movement, and many other fascinating topics. An indispensable account of early baseball culture in the Midwest, Baseball Fever is an important and entertaining study of local baseball that sets a high standard for future work.” -- Trey Stecker, Elysian Fields Quarterly

“In the early 1990s George Plimpton presented his ‘Small Ball Theory,’ which states that the quality of writing about a particular sport is inversely proportional to the size of ball used to play that sport. Without debating the merit of Plimpton’s theory in relation to other sports, he was certainly right about baseball. Over the years a number of very good books have been written on this sport. Baseball Fever: Early Baseball in Michigan by Peter Morris can now be added to this category. … Morris copiously documents his work with many newspaper references and provides his readers with a number of photographs that help bring to life some of the people associated with the early days of Michigan baseball. … In short, Peter Morris has produced a thoroughly researched, well-written book that would have put a smile on George Plimpton’s face.” – Angelo J. Louisa, Michigan Historical Review

“This is a work of painstaking scholarship that creates a remarkable prism of an early and largely misunderstood period.  It contains much interesting and entertaining material and should not be overlooked because of its regional focus.” Jane Finnan Dorward, Nine

“Baseball Fever is a must-read for every serious historian of the game. It’s not only a groundbreaking exploration of the true geographic origins of early baseball but also the most incisive explanation yet on how the game so swiftly evolved from a primitive child’s game to become a professional competitive sport and, indeed, ‘the national pastime.’” Baseball historian David Nemec

 “Morris’s Baseball Fever rewards readers on at least three distinct levels. On its most basic level it offers an original and authoritative examination of the evolution of baseball in Michigan from the mid-1850s to 1876, carefully tracing the rise and fall of individual teams, and identifying important players and promoters of the local game. In addition to a detailed account of the state’s baseball pioneers, students of Michigan baseball will discover numerous period photographs. It is precisely because Michigan in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was rural and lightly populated and, thus, ‘never at the forefront of baseball’s development’ (p. 4) that Morris views its history as vital. He argues convincingly that by observing citizens in this largely bucolic and isolated region becoming passionate about the game of baseball, we can better understand a critical but largely neglected aspect of baseball’s history.
        “On a second level Morris thoughtfully employs developments in Michigan to compare and contrast patterns on a national scale. He identifies a number of crossroads in the growth of Michigan baseball, and charts their parallels in national trends as the game groped its way from casual, amateur contests to intense, skilled, and professional status.
        “Morris’s work is filled with insights, fresh perspectives, and thoughtful connections. His account provides striking proof that only when baseball was embraced by the country’s heartland did it become the national pastime. Because of his attention to patterns beyond Michigan, Morris provides readers a fascinating third level of rewards: a catalog of facts that challenge conventional wisdom about, among other things, integration on the field, the first use of gloves, the first all-professional team, and the impact of the Civil War.
        “Having drawn deeply on a wide variety of primary materials and scoured local newspapers, Morris builds his account of Michigan baseball from informal recreation to serious sport essentially on original research.
        “By keeping in mind that the national picture is often found in the small details of local maturation, Morris has produced a worthy volume and one squarely in the Seymour tradition.” – Seymour Medal Judging Committee

“Last year, while Michael Lewis’s Moneyball was still the talk of baseball, another, far more obscure book appeared that also asked its readers to rethink their understanding of the national pastime: Baseball Fever: Early Baseball in Michigan, by the eminent historian Peter Morris. The book, which was awarded SABR’s coveted Seymour Award last May, traces the game’s development from its very beginnings into the sport we know today. … This coming March will mark the publication of another tremendous advance in baseball scholarship, David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game … Together, these two books rewrite much of what we know about the game’s early history.  We heartily endorse them both.” Yanks Fan v. Sox Fan website