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.

Praise for Death in the Strike Zone

“Tom Gilbert has invented a brilliant new kind of baseball book, a mystery biography that’s a history of an incandescent American folk hero, a masterful study of the physics of pitching, and a survey of the wild, weird 19th century. Because Gilbert is an expert on still-relevant topics like gambling, pitching mechanics, and baseball economics, Death in the Strike Zone is endlessly enlightening. Creighton died young, but I’ve never read anything about 19th century baseball that’s so alive.” —John W. Miller, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Last Manager

  “Jim Creighton was baseball’s first hero, changing the nature of the game even more than Babe Ruth. Tom Gilbert's eye-opening biography celebrates the pitcher's exceedingly brief life—baseball killed him—and unveils long-held mysteries. Death in the Strike Zone provides a peephole into the sporting past of Brooklyn and New York when each was a city all its own.”—John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball

“With a zest for bringing 19th-century rogues and rowdies to life that recalls Lucy Sante’s Low Life, Thomas Gilbert's Death in the Strike Zone grapples with the paradox that was James Creighton, at once baseball’s first star and yet practically a cipher thanks to his premature death. Gilbert expertly unravels the mysteries around Creighton—where he came from, how he dominated hitters and set amateur baseball on a course towards professionalization, how he met such a tragic end—fleshing out our knowledge of an important, and underappreciated figure in the development of the national pastime.”—Jay Jaffe, Senior Writer, FanGraphs