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Just as “winter ball” in Mexico and Cuba evolved into a commercially viable seasonal institution of American organized baseball in the early decades of the twentieth century thanks to improved trans-­Caribbean transport , communications infrastructures, and a growing fan base, American baseballers began traveling across the Pacific in search of money, fame, challenge, and, of course, fun and adventure. The expansion of regular passenger-­liner services in the first decade of the twentieth century accelerated with the opening in 1905 of the Canadian Pacific Railroad’s new bimonthly ocean-­ liner routes originating from Vancouver. Now with three major ports of embarkation along the North American continent, transpacific oceanic travels became more affordable and reliable, furthering the integration of the circum-­ Pacific regions as a social field, a site of cultural cross-­ pollination, and a market for commercial entertainment. Baseball was but one of many cultural and business forms that flowed through this widening transnational circuit.1 By sports sociologist Kiku Kōichi’s count, in a ten-­ year period between 1905 and 1915 alone, twenty American, Japanese , and Filipino amateur baseball teams, the bulk of them collegiate, toured across the Pacific and engaged one another on baseball diamonds.2 Paralleling this growing traffic in amateur baseball, various formats of commercialized squads began venturing out of the U.S. West Coast to offer their athletic virtuosity and visual spectacles for pay in Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines. Some traveled with sophisticated business prearrangements . Others took off with only preliminary or tentative plans— or no plans at all. Every American professional expedition introduced new business and crowd-­pleasing elements to Japanese baseball and left a taste of what playing ball commercially was like. By the beginning of the 1930s, swaggering big leaguers were ready to travel west to Asia on this THE BUSINESS OF ​ BASEBALL ​ 4 110 | The Business of Baseball well-­ trodden route of American athletic entertainers. They found a fitting partner in the ambition and promotional genius of a Japanese media magnate. The result was the major leagues’ first formal postseason tour to Japan in 1931. The Reach All-­ Americans’ 1908 Far Eastern Tour The first American baseball professionals to hit the shores of Japan were the Reach All-­Americans, a traveling team of four major leaguers recruited from the upstart American League, including Pat Flaherty of the Boston Nationals, and fourteen minor leaguers based in California. The amalgamated troupe, which landed in Japan in late November 1908, was assembled by the A. J. Reach Company, a sporting-­goods company founded in 1874 and headquartered in Philadelphia. The team’s manager was Mike Fisher, a key mover of the Pacific Coast League. The life of the A. J. Reach Company’s founder, Albert Reach, an English-­ born former second baseman for the Brooklyn Eckford club and the Philadelphia Athletics, epitomized the growth of baseball as a business and the monopolistic enterprise it had become in Gilded Age America. Reach’s contemporaries, including A.G. Spalding, considered him America’s very first baseball professional when Brooklyn’s star infielder was recruited away by the Philadelphia Athletics club, or A’s, in 1865 for a full-­ time salary of twenty-­ five dollars. Upon retiring from his position as the team’s playing manager in 1875, Reach bought into the incorporation of the Philadelphia Phillies, a franchise in the newly organized National League, and served as the club’s president between 1883 and 1899. In the interim, Reach the entrepreneur ran a varietyof retail businesses in Philadelphia. In 1881, he partnered with a Philadelphia sporting-­ goods manufacturer and small shareholder in the A’s franchise, Benjamin Franklin Shibe. The result was the A. J. Reach Company. Having invented and popularized a novel two-­ piece cover for baseballs, Shibe supplied manufacturing knowledge and Reach the sales skills and business connections. It was a winning combination.3 As the sporting-­ goods markets grew in the 1880s, Reach’s company at one point threatened to cut seriously into Spalding & Brothers’ market shares and even began publishing its own “official” annual baseball guide in 1882 to compete with Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide, the NL’s annually published baseball authority. Spalding responded to this challenge the same way he had been dealing with other lesser competitors, that is, by buying them. Ever a shrewd businessman, Spalding allowed the A. J. Reach Company to keep its name after the 1889 buyout so his company’s [3.142.197.212] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 09:29 GMT...

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