Mystical baseball

Imagine my surprise, paging through the photos in my fresh new copy of John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game , to find two familiar faces staring at me: Helena Blavatsky, theosophist, and Henry Steel Olcott, lapsed Presbyterian and “white Buddhist.” The caption notes that the two founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, and in 1878 “handed the reins to Abner Doubleday” – the man who, according to Thorn’s revisionist account, did not invent baseball.