My book, Death in the Strike Zone: The Mystery of America’s first Baseball Hero, tackles the many unanswered questions about James Creighton, baseball’s first nationally famous ballplayer. Why he has no plaque in Cooperstown is one of them.

Once considered the greatest pitcher ever, Creighton is largely forgotten today. This, however, may well be more a result than a cause of his absence from the Hall. Not only was Creighton the best pitcher on the best team in baseball in 1860, he reinvented pitching from the ground up. In a time when there was no strike zone, pitches maxxed out at about 50 MPH and curve balls did not yet exist, Creighton figured out a way to reach a velocity of twice that high and to make his pitches curve. He was also shockingly precise, pumping pitch after unhittable pitch over the plate, as overmatched opposing batters stood with their bats on their shoulders. Baseball’s rules makers were forced to act. Called strikes were introduced; then called balls. The eventual result was the strike zone.

The changes caused by Creighton’s revolutionary way of pitching dwarf those famously credited to Babe Ruth. Ruth changed the way batters swung by demonstrating that uppercutting long fly balls produced more runs than slapping line drives do. But James Creighton changed the deep structure of the game. The battle for control of the strike zone is not only the center of the action in modern baseball, it is the action. It is what we are looking at when we watch baseball on a TV screen.

James Creighton had a very brief career, but his stardom helped make baseball our first national sport. He almost never lost. The first known recruited youth athlete in American team sports, he was the first baseball player to be called a “phenom.” His image appears on what many consider the first baseball card. He may have been the first player to be paid.

The biggest reason why Creighton is not in the Hall is fairly obvious. He never played in the Major Leagues — or in any professional league. That is because they did not exist; the first pro league was founded 9 years after Creighton died. Even though some pre-professional era greats have slipped in, the Hall of Fame is a creature of professional baseball and has never been much interested in what came before it. In other words, Creighton’s historical importance was his impact on the game of baseball, not directly on professional baseball as an institution. Another problem is that Amateur Era baseball was unorganized and its statistics were primitive. As undeniably great as he was, there is little in the way of numbers to support Creighton’s case.

Ironically enough, while researching my biography of Creighton I ran across a 1935 letter from Alexander Cleland, the idea man behind the founding of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In it he proposes that the first thing the Hall should do is to honor a group of obvious baseball immortals from the game’s early history. Right at the top of the list is James Creighton.