In my younger and more vulnerable days I wanted to be an athlete – a professional baseball player, specifically – so it was little surprise that my reading list was a catalogue of my wildest (yet completely representative) fantasies.  The Fox Steals Home and Honus and Me are two titles off the top of my head.  These days baseball ‘literature’ strikes a more dirge-like note of hard reality: Juiced, Vindicated, The Mitchell Report, My Prison without Bars, and so on.  The child inside me wonders, ‘What has happened to our game’s pastoral, innocent beginnings?’

This question – and several more – is swiftly yet stylishly answered in Jay Martin’s new book, Live All You Can: Alexander Joy Cartwright and the Invention of Modern Baseball.  The title is as guileless as my pre-pubescent potboilers, and the history just as straightforward: here is the creator of baseball; this is how it happened; this is the rest of his life.

Martin described his book’s genesis: ‘I was in the political archives for the state of Hawaii, and I asked for Cartwright’s … I was expecting about half a folder, but I got twelve manuscript boxes.’  The wealth of material suits Martin’s descriptive temperament well; it is Cartwright’s life that fills the volume, more so than the origin of baseball (a question already resolved by page eleven, where Martin writes, ‘Alexander Joy Cartwright invented baseball in 1845.’)  Martin is a some-time biographer – ‘I’ve done ones on Henry Miller, Robert Lowell, Conrad Aiken’ – and the particulars of Cartwright’s life are colorful enough to rival any literary ‘life of’: travel to Hawaii; work among the sugar plantations; the consecration of Cartwright Field, ‘the oldest baseball field in America.’  (This field still stands, on the grounds of the Punahou School; to this day, Sports Illustrated ranks Punahou as the best high school for athletics in the nation.)

I digress, but the joy of baseball is in the details – if you don’t love every gentle breeze, every crotch-grab, every move to first, a game is an amorphous, three-hour borefest – and Live All You Can does a similar job of sustaining interest, if not suspense.   Does poring through boxes of dry fact do anything to diminish the mythology of the game?  I asked.  ‘I’m centrally interested in the mythology,’ replied Martin.  ‘There was even a committee – The Abrahams Committee – appointed in 1905 to answer, “Who invented it?”

‘If you ask most Americans, they’ll say that Abner Doubleday invented it.  But he didn’t.  He was simply in the right place at the right time.  He isn’t in the Hall of Fame – Cartwright is, up in Cooperstown.  The Doubleday myth was perpetuated to promote tourism in Upstate New York.’  I told Martin I was having trouble placing his accent.  ‘I’m from Brooklyn,’ he said, ‘but I have a Sullivan County accent.’  That’s Upstate, kind of, I said.  The conversation turned to lighter matters.  What was New York like back in the day?  ‘I went to Columbia, too,’ said Martin.  ‘I got the best education – the best teachers of a single generation.  I had Trilling, Van Doren, I lived with Conrad Aiken … it really solidified my desire to become a writer.’  What are you doing these days?  He was a professor of government and literature at the Claremont Colleges; a book of short stories on baseball was forthcoming, and a novel had been completed the other day.  Mets or Yankees?  ‘Yankees,’ answered Martin, emphatically, ‘always Yankees.  When I was growing up, all they did was win pennants, win World Series.’  As the interview concluded, the Bronx Bombers went up another game on Boston.  ‘Baseball is one of the major inventions of the 19^th century,’ said Martin: ‘there was the steamboat, but we don’t ride those anymore; there was the cotton gin, but we don’t use those anymore; but we still play baseball.’  As his charming, slim, readable volume shows, fact and mythology, past and present aren’t at all at odds: the more things change, the more they stay the same.