E-Book Overview
Presenting views from a variety of sport and history experts, Baseball in America and America in Baseball captures the breadth and unsuspected variety of our national fascination and identification with America’s Game.
Chapters cover such well-known figures as Ty Cobb and lesser-known topics like the “invisible” baseball played by Japanese Americans during the 1930s and 1940s. A study of baseball in rural California from the Gold Rush to the turn of the twentieth century provides an interesting glimpse at how the game evolved from its earliest beginnings to something most modern observers would find familiar. Chapters on the Negro League’s Baltimore Black Sox, financial profits of major league teams from 1900 to 1956, and American aspirations to a baseball-led cultural hegemony during the first half of the twentieth century round out this superb collection of sport history scholarship.
Baseball in America and America in Baseball belongs on the bookshelf of any avid student of the game and its history. It also provides interesting glimpses into the sociology of sport in America.
E-Book Content
Copyright © 2008 by the University of Texas at Arlington Manufactured in the United States of America All rights reserved First edition This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). Binding materials have been chosen for durability.
o Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baseball in America and America in baseball / edited by Donald G. Kyle and Robert B. Fairbanks ; introd. by Richard Crepeau ; with contributions by Benjamin G. Rader . . . [et al.]. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (The Walter Prescott Webb memorial lectures ; no 38) isbn-13: 978-1-60344-023-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 1-60344-023-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Baseball—United States—History. 2. Baseball— United States—Miscellanea. I. Kyle, Donald G. II. Fairbanks, Robert B. (Robert Bruce), 1950– III. Rader, Benjamin G. gv863.a1b387 2008 796.35770973—dc22 2007037685
CONTENTS
Preface vii Introduction 1 Richard Crepeau “Our Players Are Mostly Farmers”: Baseball in Rural California, 1850 to 1890 8 David Vaught “Invisible Baseball”: Japanese Americans and Their Game in the 1930s 32 Samuel O. Regalado Chasing Shadows: The Baltimore Black Sox and the Perils of History 52 Daniel A. Nathan The Pro>ts of Major League Baseball, 1900 to 1956 88 Steven A. Riess Mapping an Empire of Baseball: American Visions of National Pastimes and Global In?uence, 1919 to 1941 143 Mark Dyreson “Matters Involving Honor”: Region, Race, and Rank in the Violent Life of Tyrus Raymond Cobb 189 Benjamin G. Rader About the Contributors 223
PREFACE
The annual Walter Prescott Webb Lecture Series, held on March 9, 2006, focused on the theme of “Baseball in America and America in Baseball.” The theme is especially relevant for a university in a city home to a professional baseball team and its stadium, and the series coincided with >rst World Baseball Classic and spring training of Major League baseball. The intention of the series was to invite noted historians of American sport to investigate the historical development of baseball in America and explain the rich symbolism of baseball for the players, spectators, and America. From rustic sandlots to monumental stadiums, from Little League to the World Series, baseball has long been an institution in American culture and society, but what does baseball mean in American history, and what is American about the game? Why are millions of fans, rich and poor, urban and rural, male and female, devoted to a game that is always long on strategy and sometimes short on action? How did baseball emerge historically from an archaic children’s game to become a pervasive national symbol and a vast commercial enterprise? What is the signi>cance of baseball in the history of leisu