The Great Match (1887) and ""Our Base Ball Club"" (1884) were the two earliest novels to incorporate baseball as a major plot element, and each is reprinted here for the first time since its original publication. Edited and introduced by baseball scholars Trey Strecker and Geri Strecker, this volume, the tenth in the ""McFarland Historical Baseball Library"", is for anyone with an interest in early baseball and its place in the nineteenth century popular imagination.