Baseball in America & America in Baseball (review)

The essays in Baseball in America & America in Baseball, which benefits from an introduction by the distinguished historian of sport Richard C. Crepeau, originated in the Walter Prescott Webb Lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2006. David Vaught focuses on baseball in small towns in California's Sacramento Valley in the second half of the 19th century. In "'Our Players Are Mostly Farmers,'" he traces the rise of interest in baseball in the towns of Davisville and Dixon at a time when other historians have claimed precedence for baseball in urban areas, suggesting more complexity in the transition to "modern" values and institutions.

In "Invisible Baseball," Samuel O. Regalado explores how Japanese Americans used sport to satisfy several needs. First-generation Issei hoped that their offspring would find baseball a bridge into integration into American society, while the Nisei, born in the United States, sought a sense of identity compatible with the American values of teamwork and competitiveness. Ironically, Regalado shows, despite commonalities between Japanese and American ways (baseball, for example, had appealed to the competitive spirit in Meiji Japan), Nisei baseball was essentially segregated, noticed little beyond their own communities.

Daniel A. Nathan examines the rather brief history of the Baltimore Black Sox in "Chasing Shadows," a worthwhile case study of the sometimes tenuous status of African American teams in the era of the Negro League. More than other contributors, Nathan makes the methodological challenges of studying sometimes marginalized groups a recurrent motif.

In impressive and persuasive detail, Steven A. Riess explores "The Profits of Major League Baseball, 1900-1956," demonstrating that major league franchises were very good investments in line posting growth as seen in industry overall. Over time, wealthier individuals and large corporations gravitated to this investment focus, succeeding the ambitious but less extravagantly wealthy men on the make who had predominated earlier.

Mark Dyreson uses his special talent for cultural analysis in "Mapping an Empire of Baseball," examining sometimes awkward efforts to spread baseball in places such as fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, as well as better-known cases in Latin America and elsewhere. Dyreson shows the mix of boosterish enthusiasm with cultural bias and even racism, as when disinterest in baseball in Africa was given a race-based explanation.

Finally, in "'Matters Involving Honor,'" Benjamin G. Rader keenly explores the violent life of Ty Cobb, so often attributed to possible psychological instability, as a reflection of a particular cultural code of honor related not just to the American South in general but to a particular understanding of rank—place and status—within it. Rader persuasively places an individual sometimes dismissed as an eccentric into a meaningful explanatory context.

Like all anthologies, this one lacks the exhaustiveness of a successful monograph. But its virtues include the high quality of each essay and the chance to sample different methodological approaches that able scholars have brought to the study of American baseball.