Shaping the Image of the Game: Early Professional Baseball and the Sporting Press by R. Terry Furst (review)

R. Terry Furst’s Shaping the Image of the Game: Early Professional Baseball and the Sporting Press provides perspective on the role of newspapers and early baseball publications in forming public perceptions of the professional game. Furst extensively quotes writers from such publications as the New York Herald, the New York Clipper, the Spirit of the Times, the Chicago Times, and Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player. In analyzing some of the first reporting on baseball in the midnineteenth century, Furst demonstrates the importance of sportswriters, not only in shaping the image of the game, but also in influencing rule making in baseball and how the game was played. Furst writes, “In the formative years of the baseball public, the press was the only quasi-official source of information about baseball, until the advent of the Baseball Guide in 1860. The semi-structured nature and the changes occurring within organized baseball made it imperative for those interested in baseball to follow the game in the press” (92).

Furst quotes other historians in proposing that the bulk of the baseball public in the midnineteenth century was middle-class and upper middle-class. They were the most likely to have had the discretionary time and income to attend games. Furst uses press accounts to describe those early followers, and he draws a distinction between the “baseball public” and the “baseball audience.” The former, he notes, had varied interests in the sport and didn’t necessarily attend baseball games, while the latter attended games and thus were more interactive with teams and players. Both groups, however, depended on sportswriters to interpret the state of baseball, to set the agenda for the evolution of baseball, and to frame the relationship between the sport and those who followed it.

Furst notes that sportswriters often served as boosters for the game in touting the healthful benefits of playing baseball and in describing the sport as an important diversion from an increasingly bureaucratic society and from the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Age. Some of the earliest reporting on baseball from such writers as Henry Chadwick focused on fledgling baseball clubs, such as the Knickerbockers and the Gothams. Those early reports were often no more than a “crude box score, accompanied by some praiseworthy comments about the effect of the game upon physical fitness and character” (69). By the mid-1860s, writers were commenting on the caliber of play and on individual players.

Sportswriters also reflected public concerns as the game became professional. Furst points out early in the book that many in the sports press derided the growth of professional baseball; if baseball was to remain a noble game, players should be performing for sheer enjoyment and not for monetary gain. Some writers lamented the intrusion of “pay-for-play” and longed for the return of “muffin matches,” or games that were played for recreational, not monetary, benefits.

Furst notes that as professional baseball grew, some writers turned from championing the game to expressing chagrin about the social ills and unethical behaviors that accompanied the rise of professionalism. Substituting (teams loading their rosters with ringers for a specific game) and revolving (players breaking their contracts with a team to join another team for the remainder of the season) drew sharp criticism from the press. Gambling was an even greater sin, and Furst writes that reporters were quick to reveal their suspicions about teams throwing games to maximize the odds for gamblers and for players who were betting on their own games. “Expressions in the press of these practices,” Furst writes, “ranged from a mild rebuke to stinging denouncements” (99). Furst devotes the last chapter of the book to the issues surrounding the growing practice of compensating players and to the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first team to admit publicly that all its players were paid.

For sports historians and readers who are well acquainted with the history...