Chapter 3
1. David Brock in Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, 58–61) suggests that Graves may have named the wrong Doubleday. Abner Doubleday’s cousin, Abner Demas Doubleday, lived in Cooperstown in 1839, and Brock notes that he may have been the Doubleday who taught the youth of Cooperstown a game that was already popular in the New York City area.
Chapter 11
1. There is a popular legend that when Robinson was jeered in Cincinnati, shortstop Pee Wee Reese, a southerner from across the Ohio River in Kentucky, silenced the crowd by putting his arm around the Brooklyn first baseman. Unfortunately, there are no contemporary accounts describing that gesture in any of the Cincinnati or New York City newspapers covering the game. Three witnesses later came forward to verify the event, but all of their accounts are questionable. If the hug occurred, it was more likely to have happened in 1948. Nonetheless, in 2005 a statue of Reese and Robinson, with their arms on each other’s shoulder, was erected outside KeySpan Park in Brooklyn.