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Queens, in what is now called Corona, not far from the current Shea Stadium. After expenses, the players donated the profits of $71.09 to help support the fire departments of the two cities, but businessmen could not help but notice that money could be made from baseball. Within the next decade, gates and turnstiles were installed and proprietors began charging a dime or a quarter to see crack touring teams like the Brooklyn Excelsiors of 1860, who traveled to Albany, Troy, Buffalo, Rochester, and Newburgh in upstate New York and on to Baltimore and Philadelphia.
    By charging admission, baseball produced a higher level of competition. At first, the pitcher threw underhanded from forty-five feet, which was later moved back to the current sixty feet, six inches. The early pitchers were expected to merely lob the ball to the hitters, but the financial stakes prodded pitchers to try to blow the ball past the batter. It is reassuring to know that Roger Clemens heaves a fastball from exactly the same distance as Cy Young did— not just sixty feet but sixty feet, six inches. To speak of this distance is to recite the sacred prayer of an ancient religion, with centuries of begats.
    The first gate attraction, on the order of Sandy Koufax or Fernando Valenzuela, two spiritual descendants, was James Creighton, born in 1841, who played for the Brooklyn Niagras. At seventeen, Creighton developed an underhanded hard-breaking “speedball”with a “wrist snap” and “spin” that made him “the first professional star” in the judgment of Leonard Koppett, a sage of the following century.
    Creighton was also a powerful hitter. In 1862, he swung so hard while hitting a home run that he caused a fatal internal injury, perhaps a ruptured bladder, and he died at his home days later, at the age of twenty-one. His early death, mourned in many neighboring states, made him the first popular baseball player to die at an early age. That morbid list now includes Ray Chapman, killed by a pitch in 1920, Yankee heroes like Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth along with Thurman Munson, the Yankee captain who crashed his jet plane in 1979, as well as Tony Conigliaro, whose life was shortened by a fastball to the head, and Roberto Clemente, who died in an airplane crash in 1972 while delivering goods to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua. Creighton had the dubious honor of being the first.
    By the start of the Civil War, when there were already hundreds of teams in the Northeast, the game extended southward, played (separately) by white and black Southerners. Legend has it that Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad watched games behind the White House. Even in the middle of the war, baseball had its first professional free agent in A. J. Reach, who in 1864 was hired by the Philadelphia Athletics from the New York Eckfords. This was only the start of his financial prowess, for Reach established a sporting goods chain that bore his name.
    In 1863, Ned Cuthbert of the Philadelphia Keystones stole a base and when ordered to return to first, he reminded the umpire that no rule prohibited him from taking off. Life promptly became tougher for catchers, who had not yet seen the wisdom of wearing glove, mask, and protective cup against increasingly hard-thrown pitches and foul tips.
    The game boomed after the Civil War, supported by the relative prosperity and hopefulness of a postwar nation, particularly up North. With trains running, factories smoking, cities growing, there was space and time and money for green enclosures, for entertainment, and inevitably for sport. The Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869 had exactly one player from the city they represented, witheight other players imported and paid for their baseball skills while allegedly making hats, selling insurance, keeping books, and building pianos to live up to the vestigial amateur pretensions of the day.
    The manager, Harry Wright, an English-born son of a famous cricketer, conducted regular practices, outfitted his