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  • Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places
  • Jean Hastings Ardell
Dorothy Seymour Mills , Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 266 pp. Paper, $39.95.

Baseball often chooses us. One minute you're a nine-year-old kid, slapping a baseball into your mitt when you suddenly notice an image or hear a voice on the radio or pick up a book, and you're smitten with a particular team or player or story or even some artifact of the game. In the case of Dorothy Seymour Mills, you're engaged in pioneering baseball research with your husband for nearly four decades, and ultimately come to realize, despite your protestations otherwise, that you are indeed a fan of the game. When I first spoke with Mills in the early 1990s, she did not characterize herself as a baseball fan. She did not rush to scan the daily box scores and was unlikely to fall into a conversation about Darryl Strawberry or whether the designated-hitter rule is truly evil. Asked about her fandom recently, however, Mills replied, "I suppose that if 'fan' is defined as someone fascinated with the historical and sociological aspects of baseball, then I'm a fan" (email correspondence, 3 February 2010).

It is always interesting to note how a book on baseball is organized. (Blessed is the author whose manuscript can fit into nine chapters.) Mills has divided her latest book, Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession with Its History, Numbers, People and Places, into two sections. In "Part One: A Manly Pursuit," the key term is "obsession," as Mills traces the myriad ways in which Americans lose themselves in the game that persists in referring to itself as "the national pastime." Mills contends that the game in all of its permutations still owns a unique hold on the country's psyche.

"I loved discovering," she explains, "the obsessive behavior of those who admit to spending hours and hours each day (and night) at fantasy baseball, weekends at vintage ball, holidays and fantasy camps, Sundays at religion-infused baseball games, and evenings in examining baseball cards they've bought" (email correspondence, 3 February 2010). Mills catalogs Cooperstown's [End Page 172] Hall of Fame and Museum, as well as the Shoeless Joe Jackson Baseball Museum and Library in Greenville, South Carolina, and the Baseball Heritage Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. She surveys collections of baseball memorabilia; the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), seven thousand members strong, with its eternal dichotomy between sabermetricians and historians; and the appeal of the game that has attracted some of the nation's finest writers (44-45).

Mills discusses the effects of these passions upon both the game and American culture. In a section on American Legion Junior Baseball, for example, she considers how the organization "bound masculinity and nationalism with baseball" (66-67). Mills argues that the Legion has "evidently failed to include black children" (noting that few American Legion clubs are found in predominantly black communities), and she posits that this might explain the declining number of black players in MLB (down to 9 percent as of the 2009 season, according to the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports ["Around the Majors: Black Players' Numbers Drop," Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2010, C4]). Mills says, "Those [namely blacks] who do not get to play Legion ball are unlikely to play college baseball, and college is where players can be seen by organized baseball's scouts."

The reverence that fans feel upon entering their sport's "green cathedrals" has been well documented, as has been the nineteenth-century promotion of baseball's "muscular Christianity." In "Is Baseball the God Game?" Mills offers a salient discussion of organized baseball's use of evangelical Christianity since the early 1970s. Baseball Chapel, Athletes in Action, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes organize prayer meetings or services in the clubhouses, and Faith Nights are part of several clubs' marketing plan. While acknowledging that baseball serves as a folk religion, she asks, "Does Jesus belong in the ballpark? Does Buddha or Mohammed?" (86). Mills thinks not. She...

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