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| Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903-1953
ISBN: 9781400851362
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Baseball -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Baseball -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century;
It's a bit dangerous venturing into a subject to which so many entertaining and informative books have been devoted (John Helyar's Lords of the Realm or Andrew Zimbalist's Baseball and Billions, are two that come to mind). The best thing one can say about this addition is that White, a University of Virginia law and history professor and author of The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, does not take a dewy-eyed view of the game, as so many out-of-control sports scribes have done. His study on the reasons for baseball's eminence in American sports in the first part of the century, however, is frustrating. So lacking in prose style that calling it "lawyerly" would be high praise, Pastime is riddled with words like "monopsonistic" when "collusive" would do just fine. As an historian, White is objective to the point of being coy, relying way too much on such qualifiers as "may," "might" or "appear to be." After poring over old copies of the Sporting News for most of its 364 pages, White finally observes of baseball's national-pastime status, "It is possible, in short, that that status may have been linked, to an important extent, to baseball's economically and culturally anachronistic features." Back to you, Curt. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
G. Edward White is University Professor and John B. Minor Professor of Law and History at the University of Virginia. His books include The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815-1835 and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self . |
