The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket, 1838–1872 by George B. Kirsch (review)

412 Shorter Book Reviews George B. Kirsch. The Creation of Arnerican Team Sports: Baseball and Cricket,1838-1872.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. xiv + 282 pp. Illus. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Americans played a number of ball games, but did so sporadically, unskillfully, guilelessly, using various sets of rules that might even be made up on the spot, with home made equipment, on unprepared fields, in front of very few spectators. By the 1870sthousands of people played ball games regularly, and when they did so they used well-developed skills and strategies, standardized rules, manufactured equipment, and elaborately-prepared facilities that accommodated a host of fans. What explains this transformation? "Modernization," according to George B. Kirsch. By this term he means industrialization, innovations in transportation and comm uni cation, urbanization and changes in values that generated a new, positive attitude toward sports in general and team ball games in particular. In this handsome publication, the author's main concern is to show that the forces of modernization caused Americans to adjust their recreational behaviour. In the course of his analysis he explains in particular several developments, including how a style of baseball that was developed in New York became more popular than other styles across the nation, how Americans became more attracted to baseball than cricket, and how professional baseball emerged in the decade after the Civil War. Kirsch handles all these themes efficiently and his arguments are generally persuasive. The book is very well researched. Kirsch has sifted through a large volume of primary sources, especially newspapers, and has synthesized the best secondary literature on his subject. He concentrates primarily on happenings in Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Newark, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cincinnati. However, he provides enough information on cities in the South and in California to convince the reader that truly national developments have been identified. The best sections of the book are those that furnish detailed analyses of participation patterns in cricket and baseball, and those that describe the ways in which games were actually played or watched. In these latter segments, Kirsch, like Melvin Adelman in A Sporting Time, argues convincingly that in order to explain many developments in sports one has to look not so much at large economic or social forces as at "the institutional Shorter Book Reviews 413 requirements and the peculiar nature" of a specific game (17). Why did the New York style of playing baseball become more widespread than the Massachusetts or other styles? Kirsch says it was in large part because the New York rules created a form of baseball which participants could easily learn, which spectators could clearly see, and which provided "more action, more base runners, and hence more tension and drama" than other forms (71). Why did baseball become more popular than cricket? Because cricket was "controlled by an immigrant community that used it in part to preserve its own ethnic identity" (97), because a baseball game could be completed in much less time than a cricket match, because excellent field conditions were less crucial in baseball than in cricket, and because in baseball each player was involved frequently in the action, whereas in cricket "two men could stand at their wickets" for hours without hitting a ball "solidly,"leaving most of the fielders with nothing to do (101). Kirsch has a clear and attractive style, except for occasional lapses. He uses inappropriate active verbs with the nouns "cricket" and "baseball," so that the reader is surprised to learn, for example, that cricket "tended to withdraw from the masses" (196). Also, when Kirsch provides lists of "changes" (3) or "forces" (94), either the construction is clumsy or the items in each list are not mutually exclusive. Finally, sometimes he unskillfullybreaks into his narrative to mention that this or that way of doing things should be labelled "premodern" or "modern." . Despite the awkward passages found here and there, this book will be interesting and informative to anyone who wants a thoughtful summary of important mid-nineteenth developments in American sports, and of the ways in which these developments related to wider trends. MorrisMott Department of History Brandon University Howard I. Kushner. Self...