The Deadball Files

History tells us that baseball legends Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb volunteered as Captains in the World War I Chemical Warfare Service. After the 1918 baseball season ended, both shipped out for France where they were exposed to poison gas during a training exercise. Mathewson got by far the worst of it, and died just a few years later, in 1925, of tuberculosis that was brought on by his exposure. History has it wrong.

Over its hundred and fifty year history, professional baseball has experienced its share of scandals and embarrassments -- sometimes involving players, sometimes teams, sometimes team owners, sometimes the leadership of the game itself, and sometimes even the fans. There's been gambling. There's been cheating. There's been drug abuse. There's been outrageous rhetoric. There's been drunken rioting. There's been wife-swapping. There's been All-Star voting abuse. There's been overt racism, collusion, litigation, court challenges, strikes and lockouts.

For a century or more, Abner Doubleday was credited with inventing the modern game of baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. His name is on historical markers, playing fields, and for a time, even a professional baseball team. The Hall of Fame opened in Cooperstown on the hundredth anniversary of his invention. More recently, however, baseball historians have discounted Doubleday's role altogether. What if the historians are right? And wrong? And at the same time? What if we have only begun to grasp the true dimensions of the mystery surrounding Abner Doubleday and the origins of baseball?

Young night-schooled lawyer Andy Dennum has landed a position with a prestigious law firm, only to find himself tasked with mucking out the firm's archive of presumably dead files. There he stumbles across an old, and perhaps still viable, file containing a single document that might suggest otherwise.

Just as baseball had its larger than life personalities—Mathewson, Cobb, Wagner, Ruth—so, too, did the larger world. Roosevelt. Ford. The Wright Brothers. Einstein. But one man of an earlier day stood out well into this new era. That man was a diehard baseball fan—Thomas Edison. Fresh from his victory in The Federal Case, young attorney Andy Dennum and his cartographer girlfriend, Keiley Barefoot, use Edison’s love of baseball to uncover the secrets hidden in the estate of the inventor’s last surviving offspring, “Uncle Frank” Culbertson. You won’t believe what they find.