The story of baseball in America begins not with the fabled Abner Doubleday but with a generation of mid-nineteenth-century Americans who moved from the countryside to the cities and brought a cherished but delightfully informal game with them. But Didn't We Have Fun? will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about baseball's origins. Peter Morris, author of the prizewinning A Game of Inches, takes a fresh look at the early amateur years of the game. Mr. Morris retrieves a lost era and a lost way of life. Offering a challenging new perspective on baseball's earliest years, and conveying the sense of delight that once pervaded the game and its players, Mr. Morris supplants old myths with a story just as marvelous-but one that really happened. With 25 rare photographs and drawings.

"In this title, which is sure to be popular, prolific baseball historian Morris engagingly describes the poorly appreciated early years of the game as it evolved to adopt a consistent set of rules. The well-known but much-misunderstood contributions of the New York Knickerbocker Club are reviewed fully, together with the fascinating depictions of the development of umpiring, professionalism, and sportsmanship. A fine addition to all collections." - Library Journal

"Morris, a baseball scholar and historian, shows us around the ancient, pre-professional era of baseball with charming familiarity and dense, nuanced detail." - am New York

"Entertaining and informative." - The Review of Higher Education

"Morris is very clear: The pioneers did have fun." - Book Digest

"An entertaining, enlightening journey. For fans and non-fans alike, Morris’s book serves as an interesting window into the leisure culture of the nation leading up to and following directly after the Civil War." - Popmatters

"Morris’s study of baseball’s evolution during its pre-professional years is a model of careful scholarship, use of original sources, and elegant writing." - CHOICE

"As the pages turn, professional baseball comes together before our eyes, and a bunch of diverse tributaries of proto-baseball flow, year by year, into the mighty, formalized, commercial river that we know today as the National Pastime." - Associated Press

"Dedicated statistics geeks will revel in the seemingly inexhaustible supply of arcane facts and figures…. A useful reference for diehard baseball historians." - Kirkus

"The text is an intriguing study for students of baseball history curious about how aspects of the game developed." - Publishers Weekly

"Concise, clear, and colorful, this book is a delight to mind and spirit." - The Boston Sunday Globe

"[T]horoughly researched, entirely engaging…Morris achieves his main purpose, and more. He traces the game's westward advance-often along canal and railroad routes-and its evolution toward competitiveness and standardized rules. As he does, he takes the reader deep into the culture of 19th-century America, as revolutions in transportation and mass communication pushed everything, even casual pastimes, toward professionalization and commercialization." - Providence Journal

"Morris's love of baseball is palpable throughout the book…. His enthusiasm adds to the charm with which he tells his story." - The Historian

"[Scholars] may find that Porter's challenging, almost taunting tone inspires them to express their own beliefs and conclusions more forcefully, in keeping or at odds with what they will read in his essay." - Journal of Genocide Research