“Death in the Strike Zone:
The Mystery of America’s First Baseball Hero”
The author: Thomas W. Gilbert
The details: David R. Godine Publishing, 192 pages, $27.95; released March 24, ’26
The links: The publisher, the author website, Bookshop.org
A review in 90 feet or less
In the summer of 2000, between the junior and senior seasons where he would become UCLA’s starting shortstop, Josh Canales jumped at a chance to go New York and play for the Newark (N.Y.) Raptors of the Northeast Collegiate Baseball League. His second base double-play partner would be Kelsey Osburn, a sophomore at the University of Arizona.
“Our attitudes were similar, our personalities were similar,” Canales would explain. “When we played up the middle we had an awesome chemistry and a lot of fun.”
On July 11, as Canales was taking batting practice and Osburn was running the bases, Canales laced a ball heading foul down the third base line. The ball caught Osburn just above the ear on his right temple. Osburn, who had not been wearing a helmet, was conscious for about three minutes, crumpled to the ground and slipped into a coma. He was airlifted from the field in Newark, N.Y. to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, where doctors performed brain surgery.
He never woke up. Osburn was 20.
“I didn’t know if I ever wanted to pick up a bat again,” said Canales, who grew up in Carson and, at 14, briefly joined an inner-city gang out of rebellious adolescence. He had got himself on a productive path — as a senior at Carson High, Canales hit .380 with 25 stolen bases and 43 runs, and was drafted in the 19th round by Oakland.
The 5-foot-9, 145 pound infielder decided to go to the University of Florida for two seasons, transferred to UCLA, and after hitting .248 in 52 games as a junior, and improved to .376 with 15 stolen bases in 16 chances during in 53 games as a senior leading into the 2001 draft — a 16th-round pick by his hometown Dodgers. After logging a few seasons of Single-A ball (aside from one Triple-A at bat with Las Vegas in 2002), his baseball life was done.
But the death of Osburn lingered.
“It was a defining moment in my life,” said Canales, who played with the initials “K.O.” on his glove during the rest of his college and minor-league career. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t remember Kelsey. I feel like when Kelsey died, a piece of his heart went into me. He was 5-feet-5 and had to fight and scrap for everything he ever got. He had the heart of a lion. …
“This built character very quickly,” Canales said about what he went through. “I grew in my faith and learned to put life in perspective.”
It helped that Canales could turn his parents – Isaac, the pastor of 1,300-member Mission Ebenezer Family Church in Carson, and his mother, Ritha, a nurse. Canales has used his experience with this tragedy as he and his wife are pastors at the same Carson church.
“Kelsey Osburn died doing something he loved,” Canales says to help him keep things in perspective.
To start chapter 2 in his new book, Thomas Gilbert writes: “Nobody is supposed to die from playing baseball. Especially not amateur baseball — and certainly not a meaningless game with nothing at stake at the end of a season that nobody was playing much attention to. Yet that is how James Creighton, as dominant a pitcher as there has ever been, lost his life in the autumn of 1862.”
As Gilbert compiled what would be an incredibly received, COVID-enduring, myth-busting book released in 2020, “How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed! The True Story Revealed” (our review here) something seemed to sit with him that he couldn’t well shake off.
At a time when some 50,000 young men were losing their lives in the Civil War, this one 21-year-old’s death made even less sense.
As Gilbert continued to post blog entries on things he came across in his book research, an essay in March of 2021 titled “The Man Who Invented Modern Pitching — Which Killed Him” seems to have laid the groundwork for expansion of that topic for this book.
It starts: “The story of James Creighton is the oldest and saddest one in the baseball book.”
Continue reading “Day 4 of 2026 baseball book reviews: An easy lift on the weight of Creighton’s legacy”
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