for decades the literature on baseball history was dominated by books written by journalists, sportswriters, and general authors. Professional scholars ignored baseball and other sports, concentrating instead on political, social, economic, and diplomatic developments. Consequently, research on baseball was pioneered by nonscholars. In the past two generations, however, professional historians have begun to examine the impact of baseball on American culture. With Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), Harold Seymour produced the first scholarly book on baseball. The book traced the evolution of baseball in the nineteenth century. Seymour’s thesis was that professional baseball is not a sport; it is a commercial amusement business. A decade later, Seymour published a sequel, Baseball: The Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), which, at the expense of developments on the field, concentrated on the business aspect of baseball between 1900 and 1930. Baseball: The Golden Age was especially insightful on the 1919 Black Sox Scandal and the ensuing creation of the commissioner’s office, but Seymour chose to ignore the creation of the Negro leagues. In the introduction, he promised a discussion of Negro league baseball in his next volume, but nearly twenty years passed before Seymour’s third volume appeared, and by then, others had already explored the Negro leagues. With the publication of his third volume, Baseball: The People’s Game (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), however, Seymour returned to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This time he looked at amateur baseball—including sandlot baseball, high school baseball, college baseball, industrial league baseball, baseball in the military, even baseball in prisons—as well as the Negro leagues and women’s leagues during the period between the Civil War and World War II. While still maintaining that professional baseball was a business, Seymour had come up with nearly a dozen other levels of baseball that still fit the definition of a sport. After Seymour’s death in 1992, his widow, Dorothy Seymour Mills, revealed that she had been a significant collaborator on all three of his baseball books, and thus subsequent editions of the books credit her as a coauthor. Despite its pioneering effort, however, the Seymour trilogy lacks citations.
In between the publication of Seymour’s first two volumes, David Q. Voigt, a sociologist from Albright College in Pennsylvania, published a two-volume history of baseball. The first volume, American Baseball: From Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), surveyed the history of baseball from its origins to the Black Sox Scandal, while the second book, American Baseball: From the Commissioners to Continental Expansion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), covered the history of baseball from the 1920s through the 1960s. Voigt took an even more scholarly approach than Seymour, examining the intersection between play (the unrestricted pursuit of leisure) and sport (with its rules, regulations, and officials). Voigt argued that baseball set the pattern for other team sports. As a child’s game, baseball would begin as play, become sport with the emergence of formal rules and organized leagues, and then return to play as it developed a spectator following. The late historian Jules Tygiel linked baseball history to America in Past Time: Baseball as History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Past Time is not a comprehensive history of baseball but a collection of separate essays that connect various aspects of baseball history with trends in American history. For other general and survey treatments, see John P. Rossi, Baseball and American Culture (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); Charles C. Alexander, Our Game: An American Baseball History (New York: Henry Holt, 1991); George Vecsey, Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game (New York: Modern Library, 2006); and Mitchell Nathanson, A People’s History of Baseball (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
A number of American historians have looked at the United States before the Civil War. For the economic, political, and social changes taking place in America when baseball emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Thomas C. Cochran’s Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialization in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) and Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution in America: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume Democracy in America, originally published in 1835 and 1840, has been republished in a number of different editions, including an English translation by Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). For a look at the egalitarianism and vitality of nineteenth-century New York City, where modern baseball developed, see Mary P. Ryan’s Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Several baseball historians have explored the origins of the game. Robert W. Henderson’s Ball, Bat and Bishop: The Origins of Ball Games (New York: Rockport Press, 1947) disproved the Abner Doubleday myth. Since the publication of Seymour’s first book, additional scholarship has reexamined the origins of modern baseball in nineteenth-century New York City. Warren Goldstein’s Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) looked at baseball’s capitalist roots during the game’s amateur era. David Block, in Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), argued that “rounders” was a regional name for a game that had been called “base ball” in other parts of England for centuries. John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), by de-emphasizing the contributions of Alexander Cartwright, Henry Chadwick, and the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, corrected errors recorded by Seymour and passed along by other historians. Thorn also investigated the importance of gambling in giving baseball a wider audience in the first half of the nineteenth century. Both Thorn and Block also looked at the connection Albert Spalding, Pirates owner William C. Temple, and Abner Doubleday had with a spiritualism movement called Theosophy.
George Kirsch, in Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), and William J. Ryczek, in When Johnny Comes Sliding Home: The Post–Civil War Baseball Boom, 1865–1870 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), examined the impact of the Civil War on baseball. Marshall D. Wright’s The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857–1870 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000) cataloged every team and player who competed in baseball’s first league, the amateur National Association of Base Ball Players, and provided short summaries for each NABBP season. The Red Stockings of Cincinnati: Base Ball’s First All-Professional Team and Its Historic 1869 and 1870 Seasons, by Stephen D. Guschov (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), looked at baseball’s first openly professional team. Two biographies of Alexander Cartwright appeared in 2009—Jay Martin’s Live All You Can: Alexander Joy Cartwright and the Invention of Modern Baseball (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) and Monica Nucciarone’s Alexander Cartwright: The Life behind the Baseball Legend (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
For information on industrialization, urbanization, and the arrival of immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Raymond A. Mohl’s The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860–1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1985) and Herbert Gutman’s Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Knopf, 1976). The definitive biography of John D. Rockefeller is still Allan Nevins’s two-volume work, A Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), while Joseph Frazier Wall’s massive Andrew Carnegie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) offers a detailed look at that mogul.
Harvey Frommer reviewed professional baseball in the nineteenth century in Old Time Baseball: America’s Pastime in the Gilded Age (Boulder, CO: Taylor Trade Publications, 2005). William J. Ryczek’s Blackguards and Red Stockings: A History of Baseball’s National Association, 1871–1875 examined baseball’s first professional league, while Edward Achorn looked at the American Association’s 1883 pennant race in The Summer of Beer and Whiskey (New York: Public Affairs, 2013). David Nemec’s The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball (New York: Penguin Books, 1997) explored every professional baseball season between 1871 and 1900. Short biographies of 135 nineteenth-century players appeared in an anthology edited by Robert L. Tiemann and Mark Rucker called Nineteenth Century Stars (Kansas City, MO: Society for American Baseball Research, 1989). David L. Fleitz’s Cap Anson: The Grand Old Man of Baseball (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005) offered a biography of the nineteenth century’s biggest baseball star.
Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Collins, 1988) is the most thorough modern examination of Reconstruction. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, by C. Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), argued that segregation laws had not always existed in southern states but were adopted in the 1880s and 1890s. Leon Litwack’s Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) looked at the impact of freedom on former slaves.
James E. Brunson’s The Early Image of Black Baseball: Race and Representation in the Popular Press, 1871–1890 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009) examined black baseball in popular culture in the nineteenth century. Biographies of two nineteenth-century African American players are available—David W. Zang’s Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First Black Major Leaguer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), which looked at the nineteenth century’s best (and most famous) black player, and Jeffrey Michael Laing’s Bud Fowler: Baseball’s First Black Professional (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), which presented the life of the first known African American to play professional baseball.
The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898, by Walter LeFeber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), examined the creation of the American empire and the political and business motivation behind it. Louis A. Perez Jr.’s The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) looked at the Spanish-American War, arguing both that the United States acted against the wishes of the Cuban people and that American historians have largely left Cuba out of the history of the war.
The 1888–1889 World Baseball Tour was chronicled by Thomas W. Zeiler in Ambassadors in Pinstripes: The Spalding World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), who argued that Spalding’s tour anticipated the creation of an American empire. Albert Spalding’s history of baseball, America’s National Game (New York: American Sports Publishing, 1911), claimed that the game of baseball represents the American character. Peter Levine presented a biography of Spalding in A. G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: The Promise of American Sport (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). James E. Elfers examined baseball’s next big tour in The Tour to End All Tours: The Story of Major League Baseball’s 1913–1914 World Tour (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2003).
A number of historians have looked at the labor unrest of the Gilded Age. Leon Fink’s Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983) investigated the impact of the Knights of Labor in five American cities. Julie Greene’s Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) looked at the political role the AFL took under Samuel Gompers. The major strikes of the period are covered in Robert V. Bruce’s 1877: Year of Violence (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), which examined the Great Railroad Strike; Almont Lindsey’s The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943); and Paul Kahan’s The Homestead Strike: Labor, Violence, and American Industry (New York: Routledge, 2013). The Haymarket Tragedy, by Paul Avrich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), studied the Haymarket riot and America’s fear of European radicalism.
Robert P. Gelzheiser looked at the Gilded Age labor struggle in baseball in Labor and Capital in 19th Century Baseball (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005). The growing tension between the players and owners during the 1889 season, and the season itself, was examined in two books—Daniel M. Pearson’s Baseball in 1889: Players vs. Owners (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) and Jean Pierre Caillault’s A Tale of Four Cities: Nineteenth Century Baseball’s Most Exciting Season in Contemporary Accounts (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004). Scott D. Peterson looked at the press coverage of the players’ revolt in Reporting Baseball’s Sensational Season of 1890 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015). Bryan Di Salvatore offered a biography of the founder of the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players in A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999).
Other historians have looked at the reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lawrence Goodwyn’s Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) provided a broad history of the populist movement, while American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898, by Robert C. McMath Jr. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), looked at populism in the context of rural society. Progressivism, by Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), is an excellent introduction to the Progressive movement. Edmund Morris’s massive three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt—The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1979), Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), and Colonel Roosevelt (New York, Random House, 2011)—provided a thorough examination of the life of the twenty-sixth president. H. W. Brands also offered a comprehensive biography of Roosevelt in T. R.: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
Steven A. Riess looked at the relationship between baseball and urban America during the Progressive Era in Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). A number of good biographies exist of Ty Cobb, the biggest star of the early twentieth century, including Ty Cobb, by Charles C. Alexander (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); and War on the Basepaths: The Definitive Biography of Ty Cobb, by Tim Hornbaker (New York: Sports Publishing, 2015). Warren N. Wilbert examined Ban Johnson and the creation of the American League in The Arrival of the American League: Ban Johnson and the 1901 Challenge to National League Monopoly (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007).
David M. Kennedy, in Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), examined America during World War I. In From Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), Neil Wynn looked at the impact of World War I on American society, while Ellis Hawley, in The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), investigated how the First World War spurred the growth of managerial institutions. The domestic turmoil that followed the war was the subject of Race Riot: Chicago and the Red Summer of 1919, by William M. Tuttle (New York: Atheneum, 1970), and Robert K. Murray’s The Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955). Stanley A. Coben’s biography A. Mitchell Palmer, Politician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963) outlined the life of the US attorney general who directed the Palmer Raids, while Kendrick A. Clement, in The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), offered a sympathetic biography of Wilson.
Mark Okkonen authored The Federal League of 1914–1915: Baseball’s Third Major League (Garrett Park, MD: Society for American Baseball Research, 1998), a SABR publication that reviewed the last circuit to actively challenge Major League Baseball. Although more than a half century old, Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (New York: Henry Holt, 1963) is still the definitive look at the Black Sox Scandal; John Sayles directed a film adaptation of the book, starring John Cusack, in 1988. Daniel A. Nathan, in Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), examined the changing perceptions and memories of the scandal over the years. A number of biographies of the individuals involved in the scandal have appeared. Most biographies of Shoeless Joe Jackson are sympathetic, either mitigating his involvement because he was illiterate or minimizing it because of his immense talent. In Say It Ain’t So, Joe! The Story of Shoeless Joe Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), Donald Gropman, citing Jackson’s flawless record in the 1919 World Series, doubted his involvement in the scandal. Harvey Frommer, in Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball (Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1992), also questioned Jackson’s guilt, pointing not only to his performance in the World Series but also to minor inconsistencies in newspaper accounts of Jackson’s testimony before the grand jury. The most recent biography of Jackson, David L. Fleitz’s Shoeless: The Life and Times of Shoeless Joe Jackson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), did not question Jackson’s guilt or plead for his reinstatement in baseball but instead sought to separate truth from perception. In contrast to the sympathetic work on Jackson, the man behind the “Big Fix,” gambler Arnold Rothstein, was harshly criticized in Leo Katcher’s The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958). Katcher looked at Rothstein’s entire criminal career and saw him assembling the same type of organization that business leaders were putting together in the twenties. Katcher argued that Rothstein created a crime machine that continued long after his death.
In The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), William E. Leuchtenburg saw the twenties as a transitional period between traditional, rural America of the nineteenth century and the modern, urban America of the twentieth century. Edward J. Larson, in Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), examined the tension between modernity and traditional America. James J. Flink, in The Automobile Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), looked at the impact of the automobile on American culture; while John D. Hicks, in Republican Ascendancy, 1921–1933 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), connected the business environment of the twenties with the political developments of the decade.
The life of Babe Ruth, who modernized the way baseball was played in the 1920s, was captured in three notable biographies—Ken Sobol’s Babe Ruth & the American Dream (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974), Robert Creamer’s Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), and Marshall Smelser’s The Life that Ruth Built (New York: Quadrangle, 1975). Ray Robinson’s Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time (New York: Norton, 1990) portrayed the life of Ruth’s famous teammate.
Leon Litwack’s Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998) investigated how African Americans struggled to survive white supremacy in the South during segregation. Nathan Irvin Huggins, in Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), looked at the literature and art created by African Americans in the 1920s and the writers and artists who created it. Many biographies of the major civil rights leaders of the early twentieth century are also available. In Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2009) Robert J. Norrell presented a sympathetic biography of Washington that contextualized his accommodationist strategy within the racial hostility of the time. David Levering Lewis wrote a massive two-volume examination of W.E.B. Du Bois’s life—W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868–1919: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1994) and W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000). Colin Grant’s Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) looked at the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
As with the Black Sox Scandal, nonscholars pioneered the first significant examinations of the Negro leagues. The first major book on the Negro leagues, Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams (New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 1970), attempted to document the achievements of Negro leaguers and argued for their inclusion in baseball’s Hall of Fame. American studies professor Donn Rogosin, in Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues (New York: Atheneum, 1987), not only offered a colorful account of the Negro leagues, but also argued that because Negro league teams won more than 60 percent of the games they played against white major leaguers, the Negro leagues undermined segregation by striking a blow against white superiority. SABR members Dick Clark and Larry Lester edited The Negro League Book (Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 1984), an encyclopedic collection of Negro league stats, records, and biographies. John B. Holway’s The Complete Book of Baseball’s Negro Leagues: The Other Half of Baseball History (Fern Park, FL: Hastings House, 2001) is perhaps the most comprehensive source for Negro league standings, records, and rosters.
In recent years, the Negro leagues have become a major focus of scholars looking at race in twentieth-century America. David Wiggins and Patrick Miller assembled The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), a collection of primary source documents on the Negro leagues. That same year, Leslie Heaphy, in The Negro Leagues, 1869–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), explored the importance of Negro league players in American life. Heaphy found that after African Americans were forced out of white baseball and established their own teams in the nineteenth century, the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the first two decades of the twentieth century made it possible for black leaders to establish stable leagues in the 1920s. Neil Lanctot’s Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) examined the economic impact the Great Depression and World War II had on the Negro leagues and integration. Thomas Aiello, in The Kings of Casino Park: Black Baseball in the Lost Season of 1932 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), looked at the Negro Southern League, which enjoyed major league status among the Negro leagues during the tumultuous season of 1932, the year after the original Negro National League folded and the year before the second Negro National League emerged.
Adrian Burgos Jr.’s Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball (New York: Hill & Wang, 2011) documented the life of Alessandro Pompez, the owner of the New York Cubans. Newark Eagles owner Effa Manley was the subject of two biographies—James Overmyer’s Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998) and Bob Luke’s The Most Famous Woman in Baseball: Effa Manley and the Negro Leagues (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011).
Michael Bernstein’s The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) examined the economic factors of the Great Depression, while Morris Dickstein, in Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009), looked at its cultural impact. Franklin D, Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), by Frank Freidel, is perhaps the best single-volume biography of FDR, while William E. Leuchtenburg’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963) is the best single-volume on the New Deal.
Charles C. Alexander, in Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), looked at baseball in the decade of the thirties, while Wins, Losses, and Empty Seats: How Baseball Outlasted the Great Depression, by David George Surdam (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), examined the operation of baseball during the Depression. Norman L. Macht’s three-volume biography of Connie Mack—Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), The Turbulent and Triumphant Years, 1915–1931 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), and The Grand Old Man of Baseball: Connie Mack and His Final Years, 1932–1956 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012)—is the most thorough examination of the Philadelphia Athletics owner-manager.
Military historian John Keegan, in The Second World War (New York: Viking Press, 1990), offered a traditional history of World War II. A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II, by William L. O’Neill (New York: Free Press, 1993), looked at the diplomatic and political history of America’s role in the war. John Morton Blum’s V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) explored the intersection between culture and politics during the war, arguing that FDR abandoned the New Deal in exchange for conservative support for the war. Susan Hartmann, in The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), examined the role of women during World War II.
Baseball during World War II has drawn the attention of a number of people. With Even the Browns: The Zany True Story of Baseball in the Early 1940s (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1978), later republished as Baseball Goes to War: Stars Don Khaki, 4-Fs Vie for Pennant (Washington, DC: Farragut Classics, 1985), William R. Mead offered the first book to look at baseball during World War II. Two years after the appearance of Even the Browns, Richard Goldstein published Spartan Seasons: How Baseball Survived the Second World War (New York: MacMillan, 1980), a narrative of baseball during the war years. More recently, David Finoli offered an overview of baseball from 1942 through 1945 in For the Good of the Country: World War II Baseball in the Major and Minor Leagues (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002). Tom E. Allen examined how the war affected 472 major leaguers in If They Hadn’t Gone: How World War II Affected Major League Baseball (Springfield, MO: Moon City Press, 2004). John Klima’s The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015) is the latest overview of baseball during the war.
Other baseball historians have looked at specific aspects of the war’s effect on the sport. Jeff Obermeyer studied the economic impact of the war in Baseball and the Bottom Line in World War II: Gunning for Profits on the Home Front (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013). Bob Gilbert, in They Also Served: Baseball and the Home Front (New York: Crown, 1992), looked at how baseball helped boost morale during World War II, while Stephen R. Bullock explored the interaction between Major League Baseball and the military in Playing for Their Nation: Baseball and the American Military during World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). With Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), Louis Kaufman offered a biography of a major league player who became a spy during the war. Although more than 500 major league players served in the military during the war, only a handful of them saw combat, and only two major leaguers—Elmer Gedeon of the Senators and Harry O’Neill of the Athletics—were killed in the war. Minor leaguers, however, were not as lucky. Gary Bedingfield’s Baseball’s Dead of World War II: Roster of Professional Players Who Died in Service (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009) examined the 127 minor league players who died in World War II. David R. Wells, in Baseball’s Western Front: The Pacific Coast League during World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), reviewed one of baseball’s top minor leagues, the Pacific Coast League, during the war years. Merrie Fidler, in The Origins and History of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), looked at the operation of the AAGPBL, while Jim Sargent’s We Were the All-American Girls: Interviews with Players of the AAGPBL, 1943–1954 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013) contained interviews of forty-two women who played in the All-American League.
Robert W. Creamer chronicled the exciting 1941 season in Baseball in ’41: A Celebration of the “Best Baseball Season Ever” (New York: Penguin Books, 1991). Red Sox slugger Ted Williams’s life was examined in Leigh Montville’s Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero (Norwell, MA: Anchor, 2005) and Ben Bradlee Jr.’s The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (New York: Back Bay Books, 2014), while Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, by Richard Ben Cramer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), offered a brutally honest examination of the life of the Yankee Clipper.
After fighting against oppression during the war, many Americans reassessed racial attitudes after the war. Harvard Sitkoff offered a helpful overview of the civil rights movement in The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). Noteworthy books on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference include Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963, by Taylor Branch (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, by Adam Fairclough (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); and David Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986).
As one of the first American institutions to desegregate, baseball helped shape American society after the war. Brian Carroll looked at the impact of the African American press’s coverage of baseball in When to Stop the Cheering? The Black Press, the Black Community, and the Integration of Professional Baseball (New York: Routledge, 2006). Lee Lowenfish’s Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007) and Murray Polner’s Branch Rickey: A Biography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007) are recent biographies of the general manager who signed Jackie Robinson to a major league contract. Bill Veeck’s claim that he attempted to integrate the Philadelphia Phillies during World War II appeared in the autobiography he wrote with Edward Linn, Veeck—As in Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck (New York: Putnam, 1962).
Perhaps no baseball figure has received as much attention from scholars as Jackie Robinson. Arnold Rampersad, with Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997), and Jules Tygiel, with Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), both offered excellent biographies of Jackie Robinson. Robinson’s first season in the major leagues is chronicled in Jonathan Eig’s Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007) and Scott Simon’s Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007). Thomas W. Zeiler edited a primary source reader called Jackie Robinson and Race in America: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2014).
Other historians have looked at many of the factors that defined the fifties. Elaine Tyler May, in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), investigated the link between white, middle-class American family life and the Cold War. Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV: Television and the Ideal Family in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) looked at the impact television had on American culture in the postwar period. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, by Kenneth T. Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), examined American suburbs from the 1820s to the late twentieth century. Thomas C. Reeves’s The Life and Times of Joseph McCarthy (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997) offered a recent biography of the US senator behind much of the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s.
John P. Rossi, in A Whole New Game: Off the Field Changes in Baseball, 1946–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), explored baseball between the end of World War II and the major league expansion of the early 1960s. Robert Weintraub’s The Victory Season: The End of World War II and the Birth of Baseball’s Golden Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 2013) reviewed the 1946 baseball season, the first season after the war ended. David Halberstam, in The Summer of ’49 (New York: Morrow, 1989), chronicled the 1949 pennant race between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. Harvey Frommer’s New York City Baseball: The Last Golden Age, 1947–1957 (New York: Macmillan, 1980), republished as New York City Baseball: The Golden Age, 1947–1957 (Boulder, CO: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2013), surveyed the era when New York City truly ruled the baseball world. In The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together (New York: Doubleday, 2003), Michael Shapiro looked at Brooklyn’s last pennant-winning season in 1956. Robert E. Murphy, in After Many a Summer: The Passing of the Giants and the Dodgers and a Golden Age in New York Baseball (Somerville, MA: Union Square Press, 2009), looked at the transfer of New York City’s two National League teams to California, while Neil Sullivan’s The Dodgers Move West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) examined the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Steven Travers, in A Tale of Three Cities: The 1962 Baseball Season in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (Sterling, VA: Potomac Books, 2009), looked at the 1962 National League season, which not only saw the creation of the New York Mets but also featured a tight pennant race between the Dodgers and Giants. In their respective autobiographies, Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin offered their own explanation for the 1956 incident at the Copacabana. While the conventional thought is Yankees right fielder Hank Bauer was responsible for the broken jaw suffered by the nightclub patron who was heckling the players, both Martin and Mantle claimed in their books—Number 1, by Billy Martin and Peter Golenbock (New York: Delacorte Press, 1980), and The Mick: An American Hero: The Legend and the Glory, by Mickey Mantle and Herb Gluck (New York: Doubleday, 1985)—that the nightclub’s bouncer had punched the man.
Kim McQuaid’s The Anxious Years: America in the Vietnam-Watergate Era (New York: Basic Books, 1989) offered an excellent overview of the period from 1968 to 1974. George C. Herring’s America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: Wiley, 1979) was a groundbreaking examination of the Vietnam War. Tom Wells looked at the antiwar movement and its impact on government policy in The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Despite the fact that she limited her book to middle-class white women, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963) played a key role in sparking the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies. Sara Evans’s Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979) looked at how the women’s liberation movement grew out of the civil rights movement. Both Terry Anderson, in The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Todd Gitlin, in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), examined the protest movements of the sixties, while James Miller’s “Democracy in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) looked at the creation of the left-wing group Students for a Democratic Society. Allan Kozinn, in The Beatles (London: Phaidon, 1995), republished as The Beatles: From Cavern to Rooftop (London: Phaidon, 2010), explored both the music of the Beatles and the group’s impact on society.
The protest movements of the sixties and seventies exerted an impact on baseball. Players’ union president Marvin Miller’s memoir, A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1991), looked back at his attempt to overturn the reserve clause. Robert F. Burk’s Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015) offered a biography of Miller. There are at least three biographies of Oakland’s maverick owner Charles O. Finley—Bill Libby’s Charlie O. & the Angry A’s: The Low and Inside Story of Charlie O. Finley and Baseball’s Most Colorful Team (New York: Doubleday, 1975), Herb Michelson’s Charlie O: Charles Oscar Finley vs. the Baseball Establishment (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), and Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman, by G. Michael Green and Roger D. Launius (New York: Walker, 2010). Brad Snyder wrote an excellent biography of Curt Flood, A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports (New York: Penguin, 2006). Robert M. Goldman’s One Man Out: Curt Flood vs. Baseball (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008) examined Flood’s legal case. Flood, with the help of Richard Carter, offered his own version of his dispute with baseball in his autobiography The Way It Is (New York: Trident Press, 1971).
Rick Perlstein, in The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), examined America’s turn to conservatism following the turmoil of Vietnam and Watergate. Political economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, in The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1990), looked at the economic changes that have taken place in the United States since the mid-1970s.
Baseball also underwent significant economic changes during the period of the Great U-Turn. Ronald W. Cox and Daniel Skidmore-Hess, in Free Agency and Competitive Balance in Baseball (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), and Daniel Gilbert, in Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), examined baseball during the era of free agency. New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, the first baseball executive to take advantage of free agency, has been the subject of at least three biographies—Dick Schaap’s Steinbrenner! (New York: Putnam, 1982), Peter Golenbock’s The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built the Yankee Empire (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2009), and Bill Madden’s Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball (New York: Harper, 2010). Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis (New York: Norton, 2003), looked at how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane used nontraditional methods to assemble a winning team despite being located in baseball’s smallest market. Former player Jose Canseco admitted his own steroid use—and pointed the finger at other major leaguers—in Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big (New York: Regan Books, 2005).
Rebecca T. Alpert’s Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) examined Jewish involvement in both the management of the Negro leagues and the movement to end segregation in baseball. Peter Levine, in From Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Jeffrey S. Gurock, in Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), looked at the role sports played in assimilation of Jewish immigrants into American society. Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, by Adrian Burgos Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), explored the relationship between black, white, and Hispanic players in both the Negro leagues before integration and the major leagues after integration. John Virtue’s South of the Color Barrier: How Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican League Pushed Baseball toward Racial Integration (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996) looked at the man who tried to convert the Mexican League into a full-fledged major league in the 1940s, and how the league demonstrated to Americans that white and black athletes could play baseball together. David Maraniss offered a biography of Pirates outfielder and Puerto Rican national hero Roberto Clemente in Clemente: The Passion of Baseball’s Last Hero (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
Other scholars have looked at baseball as an international game. Frank P. Jozsa Jr., in Baseball, Inc.: The National Pastime as Big Business (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), examined baseball as a global enterprise. George Gmelch edited a collection of essays on baseball in other countries in Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). All-time home run leader Sadaharu Oh published an autobiography, Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball (New York: Vintage, 1985). Other books that examine baseball as an international game include Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu’s Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa: When Two Cultures Collide on the Baseball Diamond (New York: Macmillan, 1989), Robert Elias’s The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold US Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (New York: New Press, 2010), and Joseph A. Reaves’s Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s fan memoir, Wait Till Next Near: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), demonstrated how baseball acted as a source of unity when she was growing up a Brooklyn Dodgers partisan on New York’s Long Island in the 1950s. In The Boys of Summer (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), former sportswriter Roger Kahn attempted to reconnect with the players he covered as a cub reporter assigned to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1952. Peter Golenbock’s Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers (New York: Putnam, 1984) contains the recollections of dozens of people—players, coaches, sportswriters, and fans—associated with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Glenngue Waggoner introduced the world to fantasy baseball with Rotisserie League Baseball (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), while statistician Bill James pioneered sabermetrics with the publication of The 1977 Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information That You Just Can’t Find Anywhere Else (Printed by author, 1977). The Bill James Baseball Abstract (Printed by author, 1978–1981; New York: Ballantine Books, 1982–1988) reappeared each of the next eleven years. James has also applied his analysis to players of the past with The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Villard, 1985; rev. ed., 1988) and The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Free Press, 2001; rev. ed., 2003).
In addition to books written by scholars and sportswriters, readers may also find the Web site Baseball Reference (http://www.baseball-reference.com) of interest. Not only does this site contain league, team, and player stats from 1871 to the present, but it also includes box scores from every major league game since the middle of the 1910s. The Society for American Baseball Research, a baseball research and historical society, publishes several periodicals on baseball history, including two yearly publications, The Baseball Research Journal and The National Pastime. More information can be found on the SABR Web site (http://www.sabr.org).