BASE BALL'S 19TH CENTURY "WINTER" MEETINGS looks at the business meetings of base ball's earliest days (not all of which were in the winter). As John Thorn writes in his Foreword, "This monumental volume traces the development of the game from its birth as an organized institution to its very near suicide at the dawn of the next century." BASE BALL'S 19TH CENTURY "WINTER" MEETINGS is one of three volumes – totaling more than 1,500 pages – devoted to the study of the business of baseball. Published previously were Baseball's Business: The Winter Meetings: 1901-1957 (released December 2016) and Baseball's Business: The Winter Meetings: 1958-2016 (published in December 2017.) This volume looks at the years from 1857 through 1900, thus completing SABR's study of the business meetings for a period spanning 161 years. 29 members of the Society for American Baseball Research collaborated on this book. John Thorn offers by way of conclusion: "SABR's essayists in this volume (as in the two that follow chronologically, although they were published first) clearly have advanced our knowledge of the period. This will become the great sourcebook for all future efforts to describe how the game grew, flourished, fought, nearly succumbed, and survived."
