Myths, jingoistic fiction created to glorify baseball as American as apple pie, hot dogs, Chevrolets, squelching the obvious British connection with cricket, wicket, one old cat.
You want the truth, you have to read "Baseball in the Garden of Eden," a splendid new book by John Thorn.
Thorn is that rare archaeologist who can dig in ancient civilizations and then elegantly describe what he has found. He sprinkles sequins where other baseball historians scatter decimal points. He has been named baseball's official historian and he has written the best of the flutter of baseball books that arrive in the spring like so many robins.
In the 1850s, there were many versions of baseball, varying from region to region. Thorn credits Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton and Louis Fenn Wadsworth with codifying the game, configuring the jumble into one set of rules.
But first he had to solve the mystery of Wadsworth. Thorn knew that Wadsworth played first base for the Gothams and the Knickerbockers from the early 1850s to 1862. And then, poof, he vanished. That baffled Thorn who writes that, "He is the man responsible for baseball being played to nine innings and with nine men."
It turned out Wadsworth had left New York in 1862 for Rockaway in Morris County, N.J., with his new wife, the wealthy widow Maria Fisher. He later became a judge in Union County. When his wife died, he began drinking and squandered a fortune estimated at $300,000.
After selling Sunday papers on the streets of Plainfield, in 1898 he committed himself to the poorhouse, where he died 10 years later without ever having had a single visitor.
