The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball by Kevin Nelson (review)

On January 14, 1852, the Daily Alta California ran a news item that described “full grown persons engaged very industriously in the game known as town ball” in the streets of San Francisco (9). Thus begins Kevin Nelson’s The Golden Game, a nicely detailed, comprehensive history of baseball in the Golden State. His account ranges from the formative Gold Rush–era years of the game to 1969, when the San Diego Padres became the last major league team to put down roots in the state.

The early chapters of Nelson’s book chronicle critical junctures in baseball’s nineteenth-century evolution in California. The allure of striking gold brought numerous easterners west via stagecoach, and with them came the game of baseball. Nelson notes that San Francisco was the site of the first organized baseball game in California in February 1860 and that, seven months later, the state’s first baseball tournament drew two thousand fans to Sacramento. With the advent of transcontinental railroad travel in 1869, California tours by the top professional players and teams of the time became possible. Nelson recounts how these tours, along with the influx of immigrants and fortune seekers from the eastern half of the United States, helped further grow the game of baseball. As more boys and men picked up the game and refined their skills, the game’s organizational structure developed. The first formal league, the Pacific Base Ball League, began play in 1878 and was comprised of four teams in San Francisco. A rival league was founded the following year, with three teams based in San Francisco and one across the bay in Oakland. Organized baseball gradually spread south, but its epicenter remained in northern California.

Nelson weaves together a vivid account of the 1906 earthquake that leveled San Francisco and the efforts to keep professional baseball afloat across the state in the aftermath of that disaster. He devotes considerable attention to the history of the Pacific Coast League, the professional minor league that spawned such remarkable major league talent as Tony Lazzeri, Frankie Crosetti, Lefty Gomez, Ted Williams, and the great Joe DiMaggio. Although Pacific Coast League history has been well documented, any history of California baseball would be remiss not to include it in significant measure.

Also of note in Nelson’s history is his discussion of the exclusionary racial and ethnic barriers that plagued California baseball. Although far from the Mason-Dixon Line, the state mirrored professional baseball in the eastern half of the United States by upholding bans against black, Japanese, and Latino players well into the twentieth century. Nelson discusses Jackie Robinson in this context, as well as the black baseball players who emerged from California as part of the migration of southern black families to Oakland, such as Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan, and Willie Stargell.

The strength of The Golden Game lies in Nelson’s focus on the history of baseball’s at first parallel and then more intertwined development in California, as well as the contributions to the game of those who hailed from the state. Although rich in detail and context, the narratives presented in this book are mostly culled from secondary-source material, and the lack of in-text citations or footnotes makes it hard for the reader to track bibliographical information.