This is the definitive biography of the Hall of Fame player who was the most likely model, if any single player was, for the title character in Ernest Thayer's 1888 poem "Casey at the Bat." A year earlier, Mike Kelly became famous when Chicago sold him to Boston for a then-record price of $10,000, about $200,000 today. Until the final year of his life, 1894, he drew exceptionally colorful and informative coverage.
Cap Anson's plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame sums up his career with admirable simplicity: "The greatest hitter and greatest National League player-manager of the 19th century." Anson helped make baseball the national pastime. He hit over .300 in all but three of his major league seasons, and upon his retirement in 1897, he held the all-time records for games played, times at bat, hits, runs scored, doubles and runs batted in. For much of his career, he also served as manager of the National League's Chicago White Stockings (now known as the Cubs), winning five pennants and finishing in the top half of the league in 15 of his 19 seasons. Anson's career coincided with baseball's rise to prominence. As the sport's first superstar, he was one of the best known and most widely admired men in the United States. He took advantage of his fame, starring in a Broadway play and touring on the vaudeville circuit. He toured England, Europe, Egypt, and Australia, introducing baseball throughout the world. Regrettably, he also vehemently opposed the presence of African Americans in the game and played a significant role in its segregation in the 1880s. From Marshalltown, Iowa, to superstar status, this work traces the life and times of Anson and the growth of the national pastime.
Moses Fleetwood Walker was the first black American to play baseball in a major league. He achieved college baseball stardom at Oberlin College in the 1880s. Teammates as well as opponents harassed him; Cap Anson, the Chicago White Stockings star, is blamed for driving Walker and the few other blacks in the major leagues out of the game, but he could not have done so alone. A gifted athlete, inventor, civil rights activist, author, and entrepreneur, Walker lived precariously along America’s racial fault lines. He died in 1924, thwarted in ambition and talent and frustrated by both the American dream and the national pastime.
This comprehensive guide takes the reader on a historical journey, providing an in-depth look at the icons of sport, captured through their greatest collectibles. Composed by the leading experts in the field, never before has one book covered such a variety of hobby subjects. For those interested in building a fine collection of sports memorabilia, from baseball cards to autographs to game-used bats, each subject is covered in great detail. Within each chapter, the best of the best has been selected by the experts. Whether you are a hardcore collector or just an avid sports fan, this book not only helps bring the legends of sport to life but it provides crucial tips on how to assemble a world class collection. From Babe Ruth to Tiger Woods, from Wilt Chamberlain to Joe Namath, every major sport is covered. This book contains hundreds of sports memorabilia images, including many of the finest examples in the world.
A substantive exploration of bodies and embodiment in theatre Theatre is inescapably about bodies. By definition, theatre requires the live bodies of performers in the same space and at the same time as the live bodies of an audience. And, yet, it’s hard to talk about bodies. We talk about characters; we talk about actors; we talk about costume and movement. But we often approach these as identities or processes layered onto bodies, rather than as inescapably entwined with them. Bodies on the theatrical stage hold the power of transformation. Theatre practitioners, scholars, and educators must think about what bodies go where onstage and what stories which bodies to tell. The essays in Theatre Symposium, Volume 27 explore a broad range of issues related to embodiment. The volume begins with Rhonda Blair’s keynote essay, in which she provides an overview of the current cognitive science underpinning our understanding of what it means to be “embodied” and to talk about “embodiment.” She also provides a set of goals and cautions for theatre artists engaging with the available science on embodiment, while issuing a call for the absolute necessity for that engagement, given the primacy of the body to the theatrical act. The following three essays provide examinations of historical bodies in performance. Timothy Pyles works to shift the common textual focus of Racinian scholarship to a more embodied understanding through his examination of the performances of the young female students of the Saint-Cyr academy in two of Racine’s Biblical plays. Shifting forward in time by three centuries, Travis Stern’s exploration of the auratic celebrity of baseball player Mike Kelly uncovers the ways in which bodies may retain the ghosts of their former selves long after physical ability and wealth are gone. Laurence D. Smith’s investigation of actress Manda Björling’s performances in Miss Julie provides a model for how cognitive science, in this case theories of cognitive blending, can be integrated with archival theatrical research and scholarship. From scholarship grounded in analysis of historical bodies and embodiment, the volume shifts to pedagogical concerns. Kaja Amado Dunn’s essay on the ways in which careless selection of working texts can inflict embodied harm on students of color issues an imperative call for careful and intentional classroom practice in theatre training programs. Cohen Ambrose’s theorization of pedagogical cognitive ecologies, in which subjects usually taught disparately (acting, theatre history, costume design, for example) could be approached collaboratively and through embodiment, speaks to ways in which this call might be answered. Tessa Carr’s essay on "The Integration of Tuskegee High School" brings together ideas of historical bodies and embodiment in the academic theatrical context through an examination of the process of creating a documentary theatre production. The final piece in the volume, Bridget Sundin’s exchange with the ghost of Marlene Dietrich, is an imaginative exploration of how it is possible to open the archive, to create new spaces for performance scholarship, via an interaction with the body.
The authoritative compendium of facts, statistics, photographs, and analysis that defines baseball in its formative first decades This comprehensive reference work covers the early years of major league baseball from the first game—May 4, 1871, a 2-0 victory for the Fort Wayne Kekiongas over the visiting Cleveland Forest City team—through the 1900 season. Baseball historian David Nemec presents complete team rosters and detailed player, manager, and umpire information, with a wealth of statistics to warm a fan’s heart. Sidebars cover a variety of topics, from oddities—the team that had the best record but finished second—to analyses of why Cleveland didn’t win any pennants in the 1890s. Additional benefits include dozens of rare illustrations and narrative accounts of each year’s pennant race. Nemec also carefully charts the rule changes from year to year as the game developed by fits and starts to formulate the modern rules. The result is an essential work of reference and at the same time a treasury of baseball history. This new edition adds much material unearthed since the first edition, fills gaps, and corrects errors, while presenting a number of new stories and fascinating details. David Nemec began the lifetime labor that helped produced this work in 1954 and admits it may never end, as there always will be some obscure player whose birth date has not yet been found. Until perfection is achieved, this work offers state-of-the-art accuracy and detail beyond that supplied by even modern baseball encyclopedias. As Casey Stengel, who was born during this era, was wont to say, “you could look it up.” Now you can.
Think you know how the game of baseball began? Think again. Forget Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. Did baseball even have a father--or did it just evolve from other bat-and-ball games? John Thorn, baseball's preeminent historian, examines the creation story of the game and finds it all to be a gigantic lie. From its earliest days baseball was a vehicle for gambling, a proxy form of class warfare. Thorn traces the rise of the New York version of the game over other variations popular in Massachusetts and Philadelphia. He shows how the sport's increasing popularity in the early decades of the nineteenth century mirrored the migration of young men from farms and small towns to cities, especially New York. Full of heroes, scoundrels, and dupes, this book tells the story of nineteenth-century America, a land of opportunity and limitation, of glory and greed--all present in the wondrous alloy that is our nation and its pastime.--From publisher description.
For Father's Day and the baseball season: This Gilded Age adventure of a great showman, an extraordinary voyage, and 19th century baseball could well be titled ""Around the World in Eighty Games""
Baseball historian, Dennis Purdy, performs the feat of marrying statistics, scholarship, biography, trivia, and anecdote to create a massively pleasurable work.
If Cap Anson was baseball's first star, King Kelly was the first player whose celebrity extended beyond the diamond. The dashing mustachioed Kelly was a favorite of newspapermen, who lionized him as "King of the Diamond" and "The $10,000 Beauty"; of fans, who celebrated his daring in song ("Slide, Kelly, Slide") and his grace in poetry ("Beautiful Mike"); and certainly of the baseball establishment, which was willing to pay outrageous sums for his services. Off the field, he pursued an interest in acting, and played parts in a number of theatrical productions. And in 1888, reacting to what he described as the bookishness of his new baseball home in Boston, Kelly even tried his hand at writing. Play Ball: Stories from the Diamond Field was the first-ever memoir by a player. One of the most popular baseball titles of all time, Play Ball is a casual, often humorous stroll through Kelly's ball-playing past, with chapters on the teams he played for, the men he played alongside, his relationships with baseball figures such as Anson and Albert Spalding, his early involvement with John Ward's Brotherhood, his legendary contract with the Beaneaters, and his barnstorming adventures in the South and West.
