Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game - David Block

"Baseball is America's great secular religion, a collection of mythologies that reflect who we are and who we aspire to be. The game's most enduring myth, of course, is its immaculate conception on a Cooperstown, N.Y., street in 1839. Who invented baseball? For nearly a century, the axiomatic answer to that question has been Abner Doubleday, though that belief was discredited almost as soon as it was first made public, in 1908. What's more, as David Block reveals in Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, America's pastime was not born in America, and legitimate claims to its origin can be made by a handful of nations, including -- of all places -- France. While the Doubleday myth was never taken seriously by historians, Block reveals that the gospel that supplanted it was also deeply flawed. In this accounting, baseball was understood as the derivation of an English children's game, rounders, but America was allowed to retain patrimony over its national pastime through the assertion that it had been reinvented as a modern sport by the members of a New York gentlemen's club, the Knickerbockers, who codified its rules for the first time in 1845."
NYT: 'Baseball Before We Knew It': What's the French for 'Juiced'?

In Search of Baseball's Holy Grail
"... The Blocks live on the top two floors of a blue house in the Mission District of San Francisco. Block is 69 years old, with a bald head and neatly trimmed beard. One afternoon, Block was pulling old books off his shelf. They are volumes with disintegrating covers and foxed pages and the labels of long-dead booksellers. 'I have tons of stuff,' Block said. 'It literally takes hours to look at all my stuff. And I never have the opportunity to show it to people.' This is our fault rather than his. In a just world, Block would be an archaeologist hero. What Bill James did for 20th-century baseball, Block is doing for 18th-century baseball. Eight years ago, Block came out with a book called Baseball Before We Knew It."
Grantland

"Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game is a 2005 book by David Block about the history of baseball. Block looks into the early history of baseball, the debates about baseballs beginnings, and presents new evidence. The book received the 2006 Seymour Medal from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). The account, first published in 1905, that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 was once widely promoted and widely believed. However, this belief was discredited almost immediately. Although the Doubleday myth was never taken seriously by historians, Block showed that the gospel that supplanted it was also deeply flawed."
Wikipedia

"... Block’s book takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the centuries in search of clues to the evolution of our modern National Pastime. Among his startling discoveries is a set of long-forgotten baseball rules from the 1700s. Block evaluates the originality and historical significance of the Knickerbocker rules of 1845, revisits European studies on the ancestry of baseball which indicate that the game dates back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and assembles a detailed history of games and pastimes from the Middle Ages onward that contributed to baseball’s development. In its thoroughness and reach, and its extensive descriptive bibliography of early baseball sources, this book is a unique and invaluable resource—a comprehensive, reliable, and readable account of baseball before it was America’s game."
amazon

MLB - Baseball Discovered: Who's Who: David Block (Video)