Baseball History from Outside the Lines: A Reader (review)

For those who enjoy reading baseball history and recognize the significant role it can play in understanding culture—and particularly for college academics who are fortunate to be able to teach their passion—the frustration often exists of finding scholarly literature for a course short of a half-dozen or so textbooks. In addition to such a costly class booklist, available resources on the game's protracted history are often multivolume and scholarly, and as such there is insufficient time to deservedly cover the depth and breadth of the material. Other resources give only cursory coverage to the game's development or fail to cover the range of evolutionary periods that provide fresh, exciting, and true insight into the nature and impact of the national game. With either scenario the instructor is forced to seek out and supplement even the most scholarly text with journal articles and essays for original points of view and further interpretation. Having experienced the supplemental process, John Dreifort, a professor of history and teacher of courses on the history of baseball, sets about to gather recent historical literature about the game. The results of his effort will complement any text on baseball history as well as stand alone for the casual reader of baseball literature.

Dreifort's Baseball History from Outside the Lines: A Reader is a collection of essays that effectively bring together supplemental literature that, while directed toward the classroom student and enthusiasts for the game, will also appeal to a general audience of the baseball reading public. The essays are drawn from scholarly journals and appropriate monographs that cover the gamut of baseball history and provide a sampling of the best contemporary writing about the historical development of the game. Some of the essays consist of tightly focused research that depicts African-American baseball, baseball's labor-management relations, and women and baseball, while others pertain to baseball and social mobility, and the meaning of baseball and American culture, and are based on broadly conceived interpretation for the analytical eye of the scholar. At the same time, Dreifort's anthology provides a chronological treatment of the game's historical growth and development complemented by a narrative framework to interest even the most casual baseball reader.

As with any anthology of this nature, criticism always exists as to the merit of the essays selected. And regardless of the criteria employed, someone will always have one more piece he or she feels deserves inclusion. Dreifort's criteria for inclusion is fourfold. First and foremost is to incorporate the best and most important essays that are based on extensive archival scholarship and critical analysis and are at the same time written in a readable fashion. Second, essays are drawn from works created in the last twenty years. His rationale is that during this period the history of baseball achieved respectability as a field of historical enquiry. Third, and related in part to number two, is the rise of other disciplines—anthropology, sociology, economics, and others—that have brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of history and sport history. Organizations such as the North American Society for Sport History and the Society for American Baseball Research have produced conferences and scholarly journals that have taken their place alongside such traditional history journals as theAmerican Historical Review and theJournal of American History. Last, Dreifort feels his selections include articles that display the broad range and scope of issues that have confronted the game, as well as the society of which it is a part. In this respect his choice of essays is nondiscriminatory as they look at the game's heroes and villains, its achievements and its disgraces. They examine demographics, social mobility, race, ethnicity, the business of the game, and the amateur, women, and foreign players, all with distinct points of view and interpretation.

It is clear that Dreifort has effectively complied with his criteria. The volume is divided into three sections...