Did you know when the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first professional baseball team in 1869 the batters got to call whether they wanted the ball high or low? Did you know the first pitchers didn’t throw overhand? Did you know there wasn’t any bunting in the beginning of professional baseball?

In Darryl Brock’s If I Never Get Back, the reader and the main character, Samuel Clemens Fowler, are thrown back to the 19th century world of railroad travel and the first professional baseball players. Sam Fowler, a divorced newspaper reporter whose life is in ruins when the book begins, is somehow transferred back to 1869 and ends up traveling with Harry Wright and his Red Stockings, the first professional baseball team.