Death in the Strike Zone

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 beginnings of America’s pastime and sports stardom itself.

Death in the Strike Zone is a remarkable journey into the past that will keep you on the edge of your seat and profoundly change how you see the game of baseball.

Author Biography

Thomas W. Gilbert is the author of How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed! The True Story Revealed (winner of the Casey Award: Best Baseball Book of the Year) many other books, including Baseball and the Color Line, Roberto Clemente and Playing First. From his Greenpoint, Brooklyn stoop he can throw a baseball to the former site of the Manor House tavern, where members of the Eckford Baseball Club enjoyed a post-game drink or two in the 1850s.