by BaseballSoftballUK, www.baseballsoftballuk.com
Joe Gray, founder of Project Cobb, describes his newly-published book (the first published under the Project Cobb initiative):
For the past 14 months, I have been researching and writing a 100,000-word history of Britain’s pro baseball league of 1890, and the result is my first book, titled What about the Villa?: Forgotten figures from Britain’s pro baseball league of 1890.
The publisher received copies of the book on December 17 (after a slight delay caused by the snow!), and it went on sale on Sunday, December 19. It is being sold directly by the publisher, Fineleaf Editions.
Passion for the Past
The publication starts with an exploration of the background to the league’s formation. Next comes a game-by-game account of the 1890 season, which includes box scores for almost all of the contests. Finally, the subject of the league’s legacy is examined.
The excerpt below from the preface explains how I came to write What about the Villa?:
“There were four ingredients that led me to turn the surviving material on Britain’s pro league of 1890 into a full history. The first was my passion for British baseball’s past and the second was my desire to write a book. The third was my supporting of Aston Villa Football Club, which had strong links with one of the four teams in the 1890 league. And the fourth was the relative wealth, by British baseball standards, of source material. Despite being the first season of formal domestic competition, 1890 remains the season to have been recorded most systematically in the British press. It feels like the book was almost waiting patiently for someone with my unusual combination of interests to write it. Although the focus is on the Villa (playing baseball under the official title of Birmingham Base Ball Club), I hope that the work can serve as a history of the league as a whole since their story is intertwined with that of the other three teams.
“The 1890 season represents not just the first formal domestic baseball competition in Britain, but also the start of the only professional league to date with a national scope as its remit. The pro league’s victors in 1890 are not, however, recognized in the official list of national champions held by the governing body of baseball in Britain. The 1890 entry in the list includes just Preston North End, recognising the triumph of Preston’s amateur baseball team in a much smaller-scale knock-out competition. While other modern publications do exist that refer to the professional circuit in 1890, the season is rarely described in more than a page or two. This explains why the book’s subtitle is Forgotten figures from Britain’s pro baseball league of 1890. In the title, “figures” refers to both the participants and the numerical record.
The book’s primary title – What about the Villa? – is taken from a sketch by the Birmingham-born comedian Jasper Carrott on the typical inane calls from fans of Aston Villa Football Club taken by local radio broadcaster Tony Butler during his Saturday afternoon sports phone-in. I hope that the questions I am asking as a Villa fan are not deemed to be quite as inane.”