Baseball in the Garden of Eden
$25 / $22.50 for OHS members
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
7PM – 8:30PM
First Congregational Church
1126 SW Park Ave
Portland, Oregon 97205
Please join the Oregon Historical Society for a special summer lecture with John Thorn, in celebration of the exhibit Baseball's Magna Carta: Setting the Rules of America's Game, on display July 1 through October 9.
John Thorn is the Official Historian of Major League Baseball. He was the chief consultant to the exhibition Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American when it launched at the National Museum of American Jewish History in 2014. Apart from his creation, with Pete Palmer, of Total Baseball, he is often visible on TV and the web as a sports authority and commentator. He was also a major on-screen presence in and chief consultant to Ken Burns’s PBS film, Baseball, and recently reprised that role with Florentine Films for Jackie Robinson (PBS, 2016).
Thorn co-wrote The Hidden Game of Baseball, which established alternative statistics later recognized and adopted as official by Major League Baseball, notably OPS. His many baseball books over the past four decades also include Treasures of the Baseball Hall of Fame, The Game for All America, and Our Game, a history of the game which also supplies the title for his twice-weekly blog. In 2011 Simon & Schuster published his major work, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: A Secret History of the Early Game. Thorn appears irregularly in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times Book Review. Since founding the publication in 2007 he has been editor of BASE BALL: A Journal of the Early Game, a scholarly annual.