Kansas Baseball, 1858–1941 by Mark E. Eberle (review)

In this extensive survey of baseball played by many types of teams, Eberle undertakes an ambitious effort to document the growth of the sport in the state of Kansas that ranges the full spectrum from amateur and semipro to professional (both minor and major league).

Divided into two parts, “Early History of Baseball in Kansas” and “Historical Baseball Parks in Kansas,” this book is not just a study of baseball from a single-state focus. The author’s insights extend to towns and cities in every state through his lens that intersects baseball and community development. As Eberle aptly notes, “In many towns, the local baseball team was an important source of community pride and unity, perhaps even a surrogate for the competition among towns vying for advantage in economic growth and prosperity” (32–34).

In Part I of the book, Eberle examines seven varieties of baseball teams to illustrate the diversity of the sport within the state, utilizing hard-to-locate research from the basements of archives and microfilm cabinets of local libraries. In addition to white-male town teams, minor-league teams, and barnstorming major-league teams, Eberle reviews teams comprised of women, African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans. In each chapter Eberle toggles between a comprehensive review of the team type and a related broader theme or biographical sketch of a player. This combination helps to extend the applicability of the material beyond Kansas.

Excursions into the history of Sunday baseball and night baseball in Kansas are highlights of Part I. In the chapter on town teams, Eberle provides an overview of Sunday baseball legality, where ball games on the Lord’s Day were “nestled between church services in the morning and evening” and played amid “strong sentiment into the early 1900s opposing any type of organized recreational activities on the Sabbath” (37). Even after the Kansas Supreme Court in 1909 officially sanctioned Sunday baseball, local municipal ordinances continued to stifle Sunday games in some locales. Eberle’s analysis of the first-ever minor-league night game in April 1930 at Riverside Park in Independence, Kansas, is also enlightening, as this game ushered in the era of baseball under artificial lights, which began “as a novelty, but became a necessity during the 1930s” (139–140). How the portable lighting system of the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro League team, found its way to permanent installation at Larks Park in Hays, in western Kansas, is also intriguing.

Biographical sketches add context to what some readers may view as an overly dry review of teams and games in each chapter in Part I. Most compelling are the portraits of John “Topeka Jack” Johnson, an African American, and Emmett “Chief ” Bowles, an American Indian. Eberle’s lengthy examination of how Blue Rapids, Kansas, came to be a stop on the 1913 cross-country barnstorming tour of the New York Giants is a fascinating look at baseball’s role in community development. Of the four dozen playing sites on the tour, Blue Rapids, a small rural community in northeastern Kansas, “was the smallest town to host a game and was the only town in Kansas to do so” (154).

In Part II of the book, Eberle examines the nine oldest ballparks in Kansas that are still in use today, which provides a valuable look at how Depression-era relief programs (especially the WPA) fueled ballpark construction and gave longevity to baseball in the state. Beyond the construction details of the grandstand built at each ballpark, Eberle provides a history of baseball in the city or town where the ballpark is located. These nine chapters are perhaps the greatest strength of the book, as each chapter is a case study of how baseball played a fundamental role in community development, culminating in the ballpark as physical manifestation of those development efforts.

For example, the baseball team in the town of Chanute, in southeastern Kansas, started out as a town team, progressed to a minor-league...