Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency

Acknowledgments

ix aCknowleDGments It is a pleasure to acknowledge the extraordinary amount of help I received while working on this book. I began researching the history of baseball in the American studies program at Yale University, where I had the opportunity to learn from a great group of teachers. I owe a world of thanks to Michael Denning, for the depth and generosity of his engagement with my work. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Matthew Frye Jacobson helped me find a voice as a cultural historian. Mary Lui offered detailed comments on the initial version of the manuscript. Thanks also to Roberto González Echevarr ía, Seth Fein, Jonathan Holloway, William Kelly, Jennifer Klein, and Stephen Pitti for advice and encouragement early on. I am grateful, as well, to Vicki Shepard, Jean Cherniavsky, and Brenda Crocker for all they did to support the project. While in New Haven I had the great fortune to be part of two collectives that profoundly shaped my understanding of the practices and politics of cultural work. I first developed many of the book’s arguments through conversations and collaborations in the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, which in those years included Amanda Ciafone, Michael Denning , Rossen Djagalov, Amina El-Annan, Sumanth Gopinath, Myra JonesTaylor , Nazima Kadir, Christina Moon, Bethany Moreton, Naomi Paik, Ariana Paulson, Olga Sooudi, Laura Trice, Van Truong, Charlie Veric, and Kirsten Weld. My comrades in the Graduate Employees and Students Organization organized me, inspired me, and put up with me through thick and thin. I owe special thanks to Carlos Aramayo, Jeffrey Boyd, Brenda Carter, Amanda Ciafone, Sarah Haley, Drew Hannon, David Huyssen, Amanda Izzo, Mandi Isaacs Jackson, Ben Looker, Ariana Paulson, Shana Redmond, Mary Reynolds, Anita Seth, Annemarie Strassel, and Brendan Walsh. x Acknowledgments Colleagues at Macalester College, where I taught for three years while working on the book, made St. Paul, Minnesota, the warmest of intellectual environments. Thanks, especially, to Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Ernesto Capello, Duchess Harris, Peter Rachleff, Jane Rhodes, Paul Schadewald, Kathie Scott, and Scott Shoemaker. I finished the book at the University of Illinois , among colleagues in the School of Labor and Employment Relations who could not have been more generous with their support and good cheer. Thanks in particular to Steven Ashby, Monica Bielski Boris, Robert Bruno, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Alison Dickson Quesada, Martha Glotzhober, Ed Hertenstein, Emily LaBarbera Twarog, Jennifer Lee, Michael LeRoy, Joseph Martocchio, and Ronald Peters. The sisters and brothers of the Campus Labor Coalition and the Campus Faculty Association helped make Urbana an inspiring place to write about labor history. I am also grateful to the students in the 2011 and 2012 IBEW Arbitration Institutes and the 2012 United Steelworkers Summer School, who offered valuable feedback on my presentations about ballplayer unionism. The Yale and Macalester students who took my seminars on baseball history deserve special recognition. They engaged enthusiastically and forgivingly with early versions of the book’s arguments, and taught me a great deal along the way. Two excellent research assistants, Andrew Berger and Alex Schmidt, provided critical help in the book’s final stages. Conversations with many other friends and colleagues over the years helped shape my thinking about baseball in the age of free agency. I want especially to acknowledge the insights of Andrew Friedman, Stetson Hines, Eli JellyShapiro , Seth Kertzer, Mark Krasovic, Jake Lundberg, Adam Machado, Bob Morrissey, Carmen Parrotta, Rachel Perlmeter, Isaac Reed, and Kevin Strait. Josh Rosenblatt graciously hosted me during my research in Austin , and Barbara Stevens and Rufus King welcomed me into their home in Washington, D.C., sustaining me with great food and conversation every night of my lengthy stay. I would like to offer a special word of appreciation to all of the journalists and scholars of baseball whose work informed and inspired my own—I could never have written this book without the benefit of their publications. I also wish to thank the archivists and librarians whose labor and expertise I relied on, especially the staffs of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Tamiment Library, the Library of Congress , the Seattle Municipal Archives, and the Center for American History in Austin. Special thanks to Mike Mashon, who helped me throughout my research in Washington, to Laurie Martínez, who was a terrific guide xi Acknowledgments to Campo Las Palmas, and to Raúl Martínez, who spoke with me at the...