David Block

David Block

• Born 1944 in Chicago, IL USA

Biographical Information

David Block, born in Chicago, IL in 1944, is a baseball historian who has focused his efforts on the origins of the game, questioning not only the Abner Doubleday myth, which had few supporters left, but also the counter-myth of Alexander Cartwright, proposing instead the theory that baseball was an evolutionary game that emerged without a single founder from existing older bat and ball games. These theories were exposed in his seminal 2005 book Baseball Before We Knew It.

His interest in the early days of baseball was prompted by collecting baseball memorabilia, and more specifically 19th century prints and photographs depicting baseball as a popular game and not as a professional sport. His interest then branched out into compiling an annotated bibliography of the earliest books about baseball. It was in writing an introduction to this bibliography that he began to delve deeper into the question of the origins of baseball, and discovered that surprisingly little material was available on the topic. One of his key discoveries was a German-language book from 1796 that included descriptions of various children's games - including "Englische base-ball", which was clearly an early form of the modern game, and different from the game of rounders, which Henry Chadwick had played as a child in his native England and that he considered the ancestor of baseball. He has since researched the English origins of the game extensively.

He was honored with the Henry Chadwick Award in 2015.

Further Reading

• David Block: Baseball Before We Knew It, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2005.
• Andy McCue: "David Block", The Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Vol. 44, Number 1 (Spring 2015), p. 118.

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