baseball is a team sport, and so is writing a book. National Pastime: United States History though Baseball would not have been possible without the assistance of many people who aided in all stages of the research and writing of this book.
We would like to thank Jon Sisk and John David Smith of Rowman & Littlefield, who have shown an enormous amount of faith in this project. We would also like to thank Katelyn Powers of Rowman & Littlefield, who has assisted with the illustrations for this volume.
Dr. Steve Dike-Wilhelm, a historian at the University of Colorado Boulder, read the entire manuscript and offered numerous suggestions to improve it. Other people who read portions of the book and suggested improvements include Dr. Karen Lloyd D’Onofrio, who at the time was a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado, and Scott Wilson, a history teacher at Omaha Central High School.
Librarians at the University of Colorado Boulder have been of great assistance in searching for and locating resources, especially Brittany Reed, who literally retrieved dozens of volumes necessary for this book’s completion, and Michael Harris, who helped with identifying the publishers of baseball songs.
People with firsthand knowledge of various aspects of the game’s history were generous in sharing their expertise. A special thank you goes out to Major League Baseball senior vice president Katy Feeney, who provided information about women in baseball, and former professional softball player Mary Lou Pennington, who answered questions about the International Women’s Professional Softball Association.
Kelli Bogan and John Horne at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Library in Cooperstown have been a great help in providing photographs for use as illustrations. Jacob Pomrenke at the Society for American Baseball Research in Tucson has also helped with locating illustrations.
The hundreds of students who have enrolled in our course, America through Baseball, as well as smaller seminars on sports and society, deserve a callout. Many were and are fans who also questioned our analogies, analyses, and, sometimes during our ranting fits, our sanity! All are to be thanked for challenging us to be better teachers as we linked baseball to history.
Finally, we would like to thank our families for their patience and understanding over the past three years. Marty Babicz is especially grateful to his wife, LouAnn; his daughters, Brittany and BreeAnna; his son and daughter-in-law, Benjamin and Lupita; his grandchildren, Hazel, Julian, Alex, Brenda, and Osmara; his mother, Aneita; and his mother-in-law, Mary Lou, for the love and support they provided him while he worked on this project. He would also like to thank his late father, Ronald, who, in the 1960s, introduced him to a band of lovable losers called the New York Mets. Tom Zeiler thanks Rocio, Jackson, and Ella for their long, patient support, and his father, Mike—a Red Sox and Ted Williams fan with the misfortune of growing up in Yankees territory—who instilled a love of the game. This book would not have happened without them.