Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency

Notes

175 notes Introduction 1. As Warren Goldstein argues, “the experience of baseball play cannot be understood apart from the experience of work—inside as well as outside the game.” Warren Goldstein, Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 155. 2. See, for example, John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 3. W. P. Kinsella’s fiction contains extended meditations on this aspect of the sport. See, in particular, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). 4. Warren I. Susman, “Culture Heroes: Ford, Barton, Ruth,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 146. 5. For an insightful formulation of the relationship between sport’s material and symbolic content, see Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 6. See Richard Ben Cramer, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 66–67. 7. Jayson Stark, “Angels Shock the Baseball World,” ESPN.com, December 9, 2011. 8. My use of “the baseball world” as an analytical term draws on work by scholars of worldsystems theory and global cultural studies. In particular, see Immanuel Wallerstein, WorldSystems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) and Pascale Casanova , The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). For a valuable discussion of baseball’s transnational identity, see William W. Kelly, “Is Baseball a Global Sport? America’s National Pastime as Global Field and International Sport,” Global Networks 7.2 (2007): 187–201. 9. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), vii. 10. Ibid., 124; Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 1. The Roots of Free Agency 1. Leonard Koppett, “Shea Stadium Opens with Big Traffic Jam,” New York Times, April 18, 1964; Arthur Daley, “History Is Made,” New York Times, April 19, 1964. 176 Notes to Pages 10–14 2. Prior to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles, Moses had championed the Flushing site as an ideal location for a modern municipal baseball stadium, a proposition that team owner Walter O’Malley rejected. See Neil J. Sullivan, The Dodgers Move West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 3. “The Fair Makes It Easy for Tireless Met Fans,” New York Times, May 9, 1964. 4. “Text of President Johnson’s Speech at Dedication,” New York Times, April 23, 1964. On the stall-in, see Brian Purnell, “‘Drive Awhile for Freedom’: Brooklyn CORE’s 1964 Stall-In and Public Discourses on Protest Violence,” in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 45–75. 5. On the beginnings of baseball in the United States, see Warren Goldstein, Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Harold Seymour , Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 6. On baseball in Cuba, see Roberto González Echevarría, The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Louis A. Pérez Jr., “Between Baseball and Bullfighting: The Quest for Nationality in Cuba, 1868–1898,” Journal of American History 81.2 (September 1994): 493–517, and On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Peter C. Bjarkman, A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864–2006 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007); and Milton H. Jamail, Full Count: Inside Cuban Baseball (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). 7. Donald Roden, “Baseball and the Quest for National Dignity in Meiji Japan,” American Historical Review 85.3 (June 1980): 518 and 520. 8. Rob Ruck, The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic (1991; repr., Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 4. The presence of corporations was critical in the early transnational development of baseball. Sugar mills were key sponsors of Caribbean baseball, and the expanding railroad industry was an important conduit for early baseball in Mexico. See William H. Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club and other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987). 9. Joseph A. Reaves, Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia (Lincoln...