Death in the Strike Zone : America's First Baseball Hero and the Game that Killed Him

He threw the first fastball. The first curveball. He was baseball’s first star-and its first tragedy. In Death in the Strike Zone, acclaimed historian Thomas W.Gilbert uncovers the forgotten life of James Creighton, the first American ballplayer to become a national sensation.On the eve of the Civil War, Creighton invented something utterly new in baseball - modern pitching.Creighton was so dominant, so mesmerizing, that the game had to rewrite the rulebook to catch up with him.He is the reason we have a strike zone. Then, in one fateful game he collapsed-and four days later, he was dead at the age of twenty-one. Was it a freak injury or was baseball somehow to blame?Was there a cover-up? Why has Creighton been denied the credit he deserves?Death in the Strike Zone is part biography, part detective story, and part time machine.With vivid storytelling and groundbreaking research, Gilbert revives a vanished era of barehanded fielders, heroes and gamblers, and the strange, thrilling begin