The time is the late 19th century. In the rural Illinois town of Catalpa, the burgeoning new national pastime of baseball has become the defining phenomenon of the local culture. Due to the sport’s growing popularity, the wealthy and influential among the residents of Catalpa sponsor their local team to compete against some of the most successful and famous teams of the state, even going so far as to pay out-of-town talent princely sums to play for Catalpa against the best teams in the state—a shocking and scandalous move that seems almost prophetic when viewed from the modern 21st-century professional sports landscape.

Understood to be the first novel ever written primarily about the game of baseball and published within a decade of the founding of the National League, Our Baseball Club and How It Won the Championship offers a fascinating look at the earliest form of the sport that continues to be played around the world today. Noah Brooks , a journalist best known as one of the earliest biographers of Abraham Lincoln, tells what is ostensibly a fictional tale for children; but today the book functions as a firsthand account of the game’s foundational years, and provides a useful point of reference for tracking the evolution of the game, from its inception to the present day.