Death in the Strike Zone investigates the mystery of James Creighton, the most important baseball star that fans today have never heard of. A pitching prodigy in the sport’s pre-Civil War Amateur Era, Creighton was baseball’s first national star. His fame helped make baseball our first national sport and he had an almost unimaginably large impact on the development and the deep structure of the game. He is the reason why modern baseball has a strike zone, which is the epicenter of the action in a modern baseball game. Yet somehow Creighton has receded from history and memory, leaving behind misconceptions, contradictions and unanswered questions.
James Creighton is baseball’s oldest and coldest cold case. He is a mystery wrapped in other mysteries -- a whodunit and also a how done it. We know that Creighton threw much, much harder than anyone had before him, with lethal movement and exquisite control. He almost never lost. But we are not sure how he did it. We do not even know what to call the pitches he was throwing. Even batters who faced him were confused. There are other unanswered questions. Were his pitches legal? Who or what killed him? Was he a closet professional at a time when paying players was illegal?
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Creighton died in 1862 when he was only 21 years old. Before that, he was the player crowds turned out to see and little boys pretended to be. The first baseball card has his picture on it. He threw the first fastball. I argue in the book that Creighton threw a curveball years before the pitch’s supposed inventor Candy Cummings. Somehow, Creighton is not in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and most of what it says about him in baseball histories is dead wrong. Death in the Strike Zone is Creighton’s first biography.
Like a detective investigating a cold criminal case, to find answers I had to blow the dust off of ancient case files, open them up and look at them with new eyes. All of my witnesses are long dead, and making new discoveries about someone who died 160 years ago would seem to be unlikely – yet I managed to make a few.
