Yeah.

The whole purpose of the pitching roles that have, that were used up until Creighton, up until the 1860s, was to limit velocity.

The game was a little bit like varieties of modern softball where the pitcher's got a little bit to work with, but he can't throw very hard and he can't throw a breaking pitch, and the batters are gonna h- all hit the ball hard, and which defense fields most of them clea- uh, and turns most of them into outs becomes the winner.

That's how baseball used to work.

The way they handicapped the pitcher was they told him he had to pitch not throw, which as you explained very succinctly, means the elbow has to be straight and the wrist has to be outside the ball.

So that means that your hands...

Imagine your arm straight down from your shoulder in a sort of handshake motion.

Mm-hmm.

Well, and as you also lay out that because baseball was an amateur sport, amateur in quotation marks, um, in order to get him to play, most likely they had to subsidize his father and brother and sister to come to Brooklyn too, and they bought a house.

Right.

I mean, there's several things that happened to Creighton that are the first of something which is the oldest story in sports now.

So poor kid from the slums becomes rich and brings his family out of poverty because of his athletic ability.

There's an old one.

[laughs] Um, the recruitment story and, you know, we'll get to some of the others.

But, you know, I spent a lot of time with the topic of-- The book starts with a bunch of unanswered questions, and there's a shocking number of unanswered questions about this person who had such impact and was so famous once.

And it-- I think partly what makes your, uh, the story so compelling is that he died so young and mysteriously, uh, because there is, as you kind of point out, that history was obfuscated for a purpose at that particular time, so there's no real clarity about how he died, although you made some pretty strong inferences.