Tom Altherr Dedication
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This page is reserved for a dedication for Tom Altherr.
Tom Altherr's work on early ballplaying played a big part in Protoball's decision to launch an open-ended account of accumulated evidence on the origins of base ball. Protoball was conceived in a period when several academic writers had written recent books on the earliest days of ballplaying. We newcomers had the impression that everything findable had already surely been dug up.
Tom personally disproved that impression. He set forth to find additional early references, and brought many more to light. We judge that about 150 of Protoball's chronology entries came from Tom. And he found a lot of them the old way . . . not by surfing the web at a comfy desk; but by visiting sub-basement document collections far and wide. [add selected biblio here] Tom's oen search was not limited to base ball and its predecessor baserunning games -- there are a lot of ballgames that resemble field hockey, hand-ball, etc. But Tom's lode gave us newcomers fresh data, and inspired our own digging, much of it taken from online sources.