On the Fly: The First Years of Cincinnati Baseball 1866-1870

Welcome to the earliest days of baseball in historic Cincinnati, Ohio. Pick out your spot and don’t budge as you may lose it. “Thousands surrounded the grounds on the outside, standing in wagons, for room for which they paid liberally, sitting on the fences, and crowding into windows and on roofs overlooking the grounds for two squares around.” You see, “Cincinnati has baseball on the brain. Recently a President of one of her baseball clubs resigned, and a Cincinnati paper says his resignation at such a crisis as this is to be regarded as a national calamity.”

It was the early days of a game that drew large crowds to watch men play with a homemade brown ball. People didn’t realize they were seeing the formation of what would be called the national game in sports. The excitement was terrific, the betting was thick, and the players were oblivious to the fact that they were playing in the historic days of the formation of ‘base-ball’. Baseball was so young they didn’t know what a catcher’s mitt was.

With authentic 1867 artwork on the cover and historic photographs within this factual, non-fiction book is the original words and reports from the historical days of early baseball in Cincinnati. You will be stepping into the past as you enter this book and reading some things few others know.