Day 29: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April

The book: "But Didn't We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870"

The author: Peter Morris

How to find it: Ivan R. Dee Publishing, 304 pages, $27.50.

Where we'd go looking for it: We stumbled across it first on Amazon, so they get the finder's fee. It's also at Powell's.

The scoop: Morris, who wrote the 2007 book, "Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball" as well as the 2006 gem, "Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball: The Game Behind the Scenes," talks to players and writers about things they know about that period when the pro game really started to take shape after the Knickerbocker Club of New York City published its rulebook in 1845, establishing 20 regulations, such as no more such thing as "soaking" -- the ability to throw the ball at the runner to record an out.
The two factors that Morris believes brought the game from amateur pioneering play are the Civil War and players who were more serious about changing it from just a pasttime. The game needed someone to bring all the versions together and not make it such a thing as backyard croquet. Morris takes it up to and past the 1867 decision by the National Club of Washington to make the first extended road trip, 3,000-miles through Ohio, St. Louis and Chicago. Through that, the Cincinnati Red Legs began, and are still in business today.
Books like these are needed -- even demanded -- as history continues to retell the way things were way back before a lot of this was documented for the modern-day reader.

How it goes down in the scorebook: A wicked bare-handed catch.