Fleet Walker's Divided Heart
Fleet Walker's Divided Heart

Author: David W. Zang

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1998-02-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780803299139

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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.

Harry Wright
Harry Wright

Author: Christopher Devine

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2010-07-27

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780786483358

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"Every magnate in the country is indebted to [Harry Wright] for the establishment of baseball as a business, and every patron for fulfilling him with a systematic recreation. Every player is indebted to him for inaugurating an occupation in which he gains a livelihood, and the country at large for adding one more industry to furnish employment"--The Reach Guide (1896). This full-length biography resurrects perhaps baseball's foremost-unrecognized legend, "The Father of Professional Base Ball," Hall of Famer Harry Wright. The son of a premier cricketer, Sam Wright, Harry converted (together with his Hall of Fame brother George) to baseball after emigrating to America from England. Harry Wright went on to become one of baseball's most successful players, managers, and innovators. Among his lasting contributions to the game were not only the implementation of spring training, doubleheaders, and the modern uniform, but the advent of professionalism, which contemporaries contended never would have been successfully established without him. Drawing on contemporary sources including his own papers, this book covers all of Wright's life: his arrival in America; his experiences with the undefeated Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869-70; his relationship with his wives and children; his experiences in Boston, Providence, and Philadelphia; his death at age 60 in 1895; and his election to the Hall of Fame in 1953.

Cap Anson
Cap Anson

Author: David L. Fleitz

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-12-24

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1476612676

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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.

Baseball in the Garden of Eden
Baseball in the Garden of Eden

Author: John Thorn

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-03-20

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0743294041

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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.

Cap Anson 2
Cap Anson 2

Author: Howard W. Rosenberg

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 0972557415

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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.

"Play Ball"

Author: Mike “King” Kelly

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2006-03-07

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0786423633

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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.

National Pastime
National Pastime

Author: Martin C. Babicz

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-10-13

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1442235853

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From its modest beginnings in rural America to its current status as an entertainment industry in postindustrial America enjoyed worldwide by millions each season, the linkages between baseball’s evolution and our nation’s history are undeniable. Through war, depression, times of tumultuous upheaval and of great prosperity – baseball has been held up as our national pastime: the single greatest expression of America’s values and ideals. Combining a comprehensive history of the game with broader analyses of America’s historical and cultural developments, National Pastime encapsulates the values that have allowed it to endure: hope, tradition, escape, revolution. While nostalgia, scandal, malaise and triumph are contained within the study of any American historical moment, we see in this book that the tensions and developments within the game of baseball afford the best window into a deeper understanding of America’s past, its purpose, and its principles.

Ty Cobb Unleashed
Ty Cobb Unleashed

Author: Howard W. Rosenberg

Publisher:

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 554

ISBN-13: 9780972557443

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Was or was not Ty Cobb a racist? For three years, there has been an unresolved standoff between two 2015 biographies of the Hall of Fame player. One of the two, as of March 2018, was in the top 25 of baseball bestsellers on Amazon.com: the paperback version of Charles Leerhsen's Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty (Simon & Schuster). That book has been publicized well. A five-minute video that Leerhsen commissioned for 2017, as an exclusive to the Web site of conservative commentator Dennis Prager (https://www.prageru.com/videos/calling-good-people-racist-isnt-new-case-ty-cobb), has had around 3.5 million views, according to the link above. Although the paperback edition was issued in early 2016, the conservative news Web site the Federalist named it one of its notable books of 2017 (http://thefederalist.com/2017/12/15/the-federalists-notable-books-of-2017/). The other 2015 Cobb biography is Tim Hornbaker's War on the Basepaths: The Definitive Biography of Ty Cobb (Sports Publishing). One major subsequent try has been made to weigh in on Cobb and his alleged racism: Steven Elliott Tripp's 2016 Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood: A Red-Blooded Sport for Red-Blooded Men (Rowman & Littlefield). Tripp's book, while a worthy scholarly work, did not explicitly try to reconcile Leerhsen and Hornbaker. Howard W. Rosenberg is the definitive biographer of 19th-century Hall of Famer Cap Anson. That includes being the horse's mouth on Anson's racism (https://howardwrosenberg.atavist.com/racism-bbhistory), especially its alleged impact on the drawing of the sport's "color line" in the 19th century. In Ty Cobb Unleashed, he applies a similar comprehensive approach to Cobb, who is considered among whites the most disliked star white player of pre-steroid times. For weighing in on the two 2015 books, an effort that also includes redoing big parts of the Cobb story, Ty Cobb Unleashed may be among the most impactful baseball books in recent memory. Most previous books are not worth revisiting with the closest of scrutiny. But the two Cobb ones no doubt are, especially because, in media coverage, Leerhsen's more revisionist one has so dominated the other.

Spalding's World Tour
Spalding's World Tour

Author: Mark Lamster

Publisher: Public Affairs

Published: 2006-04-03

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9781586483111

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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""

Sporting Performances
Sporting Performances

Author: Shannon L. Walsh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-06

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0429560184

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Sporting Performances is the first anthology to tackle sports and physical culture from a performance perspective; it serves as an invitation and provocation for scholarly discourse on the connections between sports and physical culture, and theatre and performance. Through a series of intriguing case studies that blur the lines between the realms of politics, sports, physical culture, and performance, this book assumes that sporting performances, much like theatre, serve as barometers, mirrors, and refractors of the culture in which they are enmeshed. Some of the topics include nineteenth-century variety show pugilists, athletes on Broadway, sumo wrestlers, rhythmic gymnasts, and Strava enthusiasts. While analyzing sport through the lens of theatre and performance, this anthology reflects on how physical culture and sports contribute to identity formation and the effects of nuanced imprints of physical activity on the mind, soul, and tongue. Written primarily for those interested in physical fitness, sports, dance, and physical theatre, this interdisciplinary volume is a crucial tool for Performance and Theatre Studies students and those in the fields of Sports Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies more broadly.