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Acknowledgments The idea for this book developed out of conversations with Bill Kirwin, the founder and editor of Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. I am also grateful to Ted Gilman, Dan Gordon , Bill Kelly, Alan Klein, Marty Kuehnert, Tim Wiles, Franklin Otto, Robert Whiting, and Rob Wilson, my colleagues in baseball scholarship, for their suggestions about the shape of the book and the selection of its contributors. I thank Sharon Gmelch, Dan Gordon, Jim Mann, Franklin Otto, Bill Kirwin, Alan Klein, and Lisa Quirk for their insightful comments on drafts of the manuscript. I owe many thanks to the participants and the organizers of the Baseball and American Culture symposium in Cooperstown, New York, and the Nine Spring Training Conference held in Tucson , Arizona. These annual gatherings of baseball academics have helped incubate many ideas about baseball culture and history. I am indebted to the Freeman Foundation and to Union College’s East Asian Studies program for a generous grant that enabled Ted Gilman and me to bring to our campus the leading scholars of baseball in Asia, three of whom became contributors to this volume. Baseball Hall of Fame librarians Bill Francis and Tim Wiles were, as always, an immense help, as were Union College reference librarians Donna Burton, Bruce Connolly, Dave Gerhan, and Mary Cahill. For unstinting assistance in editing the essays, for ensuring their coherence, and for keeping the language accessible , I thank Union College Anthropology Department aides xii Emily Laing, Sandra Vega, and Amy Bell. Their efforts have made this a much better book. My agent, Robert Wilson, gave wise counsel and urged me to expunge all jargon and reach out to a broader audience. Special thanks go to Rob Taylor, editor at the University of Nebraska Press, for his support of the project and to others at the press for shepherding the manuscript through the publication process. Morgan Gmelch did a splendid job on the index. If I may single out a few of my academic colleagues, I have benefited from frequent discussions on all matters of sport and writing with David Baum, Ian Condry, Richard Felson, Sharon Gmelch, Walt and Paula Gmelch, Jerry Handler, Lisa Quirk, Teresa Meade, Richard Nelson, Derek Pardue, Andor Skotnes, and Kenji Tierney. Of course, my appreciation goes to all of the authors in the volume for their responsiveness and commitment and for the quality of their contributions. Their essays have greatly changed my appreciation of baseball beyond U.S. borders. ...

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