Project MUSE®: NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 9 (2000/01) through current issueLatest Articles: NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and CultureTWOProject MUSE®NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture1534-18441188-9330Latest articles in NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Cheap Seats: A Note from the Editor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968552
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This year marks the 75th anniversary of Vin Scully's first called game. I was not around back then nor for any of the subsequent eighteen seasons he spent behind the mic in Brooklyn and then Los Angeles. Nevertheless, having grown up in Southern California, I can't separate my early experiences of the game from Vin Scully's voice. My parents were big Dodgers fans, though both were transplants: my father from Indiana, my mother from Long Island. When I was a child, only a handful of Dodgers games were broadcast on television, so (like most baseball fans around the country) we listened on the radio—primarily, a large Magnavox stereo console in the living room. But Scully's voice filled other spaces, too: the car, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallThe Cheap Seats: A Note from the Editor2025-08-27text/htmlen-USThe Cheap Seats: A Note from the Editor2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®63172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Diamond Quotes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968553
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"You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and it turns out it was the other way around all the time."jim bouton"There have been only two geniuses in the world: Willie Mays and William Shakespeare."tallulah bankhead"The Trick is growing up without growing old."casey stengel."Baseball players are the weirdest of all. I think it's all that organ music."peter gent"The best thing about baseball is that you can do something about yesterday tomorrow."manny trillo"Every season has its peaks and valleys. What you have to try to eliminate is the Grand Canyon."andy van slyke"The most amazing thing I've ever seen was Jay Johnstone in uniform in line at a concession stand at Dodger Stadium after a game had
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallDiamond Quotes2025-08-27text/htmlen-USDiamond Quotes2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®28072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Love It: Moneyball
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968555
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I have always been fascinated by those things that I don't fully understand. This is especially true of all that "left-brained stuff." Science. Math. Technology. When I was a teenager, I enjoyed reading techno-thrillers, especially Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain and Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October. These authors could not only spin a great story, but they could also explain technical or scientific details in ways that even I could wrap my feeble brain around. My response to Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, was similar. I didn't read it until 2007, when I was amid writing my doctoral dissertation, which focused on mythic and psychological literary criticism as it pertained to baseball fiction for young
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallLove It: Moneyball2025-08-27text/htmlen-USLove It: Moneyball2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®321042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Leave It: Moneyball
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968556
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My niece is the most earnest person I have ever met. She approaches everything with a zeal I can only appreciate from afar, as I'm pretty sure I've never felt as passionate about anything as much as she feels about pretty much everything. It's a talent and a skill, no doubt. In certain circumstances, however, it has its drawbacks.Rereading Michael Lewis's Moneyball1 I couldn't stop thinking about the evening a few years back when my extended family was strewn about my mother's living room in our post-Thanksgiving meal haze, talking about music. As most of us in the room were around my age, the topic turned, as it invariably does, to embarrassing bands of the '70s and '80s. Of course, Starlight Vocal Band found its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallLeave It: Moneyball2025-08-27text/htmlen-USLeave It: Moneyball2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®456492026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Remembering Pete
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968558
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I was covering spring training in Vero Beach in the late '80s, and early one morning, I wandered out to a practice field where the visiting teams worked out before playing exhibition games against the Dodgers. I waited for a few minutes until I was joined by Jim Murray, the legendary sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times. "Waiting for Pete?" Jim asked. "I sure am," I said.I was happy to have my choice of a column subject acknowledged by such eminence. Jim and I chatted a while until the Cincinnati Reds' bus pulled up, but as the players and coaches got off, we were dismayed to see that their manager was not among them."Hate to miss those easy ones," Jim said.Not to worry, one of the Reds' coaches told us. Pete
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallRemembering Pete2025-08-27text/htmlen-USRemembering Pete2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®146092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27The Cigar City's First Professional Baseball Champions: 1920 Tampa Smokers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968559
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The 1920s were an era known as the Jazz Age, or the Roaring 20s, as coined by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was an era characterized by flappers, quick money schemes, and illegal alcohol. In Tampa, the second-largest city in Florida, the cigar industry thrived and played a significant role in the town's economy, also known as the "Cigar City." For many locals, sports, particularly baseball, were prevalent. Babe Ruth, a well-known and outgoing baseball player, was setting records by hitting home runs at an unprecedented rate, marking the end of the "Deadball Era." However, that summer, the headlines were not only about the Yankee slugger. The Tampa Smokers, a Class D Florida State League (FSL) team in their second season
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallThe Cigar City's First Professional Baseball Champions: 1920 Tampa Smokers2025-08-27text/htmlen-USThe Cigar City's First Professional Baseball Champions: 1920 Tampa Smokers2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®491042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Big League Baseball in a Small Town: Barnstorming Teams Visit Metuchen, NJ in the 1930s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968560
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Virtually every small town in the United States has its own baseball stories to tell. Some can attest that one of its own went on to greatness on the ballfield, as Madison, New Jersey, can say of Don Newcombe, or Millville, New Jersey, can claim of Mike Trout. Other towns can assert that Babe Ruth or Satchel Paige played on a local and perhaps forgotten sandlot back in the 1920s or 1930s as they barnstormed around the country. Metuchen, New Jersey, a small borough located in the central part of the state, likewise has its own slice of baseball history. Spread over the summers of the 1930s, the residents of Metuchen were able to see extraordinary displays of baseball, primarily played by visiting Negro League teams
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallBig League Baseball in a Small Town: Barnstorming Teams Visit Metuchen, NJ in the 1930s2025-08-27text/htmlen-USBig League Baseball in a Small Town: Barnstorming Teams Visit Metuchen, NJ in the 1930s2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®737602026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Talking Baseball: Reading and Listening to The Glory of Their Times (1966)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968561
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"Most of us spent all our waking hours talking baseball …"The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (1966), Lawrence S. Ritter's oral history of former major league ballplayers who competed during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, is a chatty book. Ritter's interviews are essentially conversations, albeit seemingly one-sided since Ritter edited himself out of them. In form and tone, the book's narratives are conversational and feel intimate. These are virtues and are apt since, as sportswriter Thomas Boswell notes, "Conversation is the blood of baseball. It flows through the game, an invigorating system of anecdotes. Ballplayers are tale tellers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallTalking Baseball: Reading and Listening to The Glory of Their Times (1966)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USTalking Baseball: Reading and Listening to The Glory of Their Times (1966)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®1139552026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Illusions of a National Game: The Myths That Built (and Broke) Taiwanese Baseball
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968562
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On April 11, 2020, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and while the rest of the world put professional sports on hold, the CTBC Brothers played the Uni-President Lions at Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium to start the world's first professional baseball game of the year.1 Taiwan, long neglected—or isolated—by the international community, was finally gaining a global audience, not only for its successful COVID-19 response that led to this much-anticipated season-opening,2 but also for a national sport that had always craved international recognition.But this moment in the limelight did not actually elevate the profile of Taiwanese baseball or boost Taiwan's "soft power" in global influence as reported.3
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallIllusions of a National Game: The Myths That Built (and Broke) Taiwanese Baseball2025-08-27text/htmlen-USIllusions of a National Game: The Myths That Built (and Broke) Taiwanese Baseball2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®763752026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27The Uncommon Life of Danny O'Connell: A Tale of Baseball Cards, "Average" Players, and the True Value of America's Game by Steve Wiegand (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968563
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Award-winning journalist and historian Steve Wiegand skillfully blends elegance, wit, and meticulous research in The Uncommon Life of Danny O'Connell: A Tale of Baseball Cards, "Average" Players, and the True Value of America's Game. Through this narrative, Wiegand uses baseball as a lens to reflect on what defines an extraordinary life by uncovering the exceptional within the so-called "common."At the heart of the story is Danny O'Connell, a native of Paterson, New Jersey—"a kid who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, and for whom life was baseball and baseball was life" (85). O'Connell's professional baseball career began on May 8, 1946, at seventeen years of age when he signed with the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallThe Uncommon Life of Danny O'Connell: A Tale of Baseball Cards, "Average" Players, and the True Value of America's Game by Steve Wiegand (review)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USThe Uncommon Life of Danny O'Connell: A Tale of Baseball Cards, "Average" Players, and the True Value of America's Game by Steve Wiegand (review)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®83692026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Lion of the League: Bob Emslie and the Evolution of the Baseball Umpire by Larry R. Gerlach (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968564
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Reading a biography of a major league umpire is usually not a priority for baseball enthusiasts. More often, they'll read about teams, star players, or managers. If more selective, they might find interest in general managers or executives, like team owners or commissioners. After all, umpires are thought to have little impact on baseball beyond calling the games. In the case of Larry Gerlach's Lion of the League, fans should think differently.Bob Emslie, the umpire, is sufficiently interesting, if only to learn about his long career and how a former major league pitcher from Canada became one. His career was long. He started in the minors in the late 1880s, transitioning after retiring as a pitcher, having injured
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallLion of the League: Bob Emslie and the Evolution of the Baseball Umpire by Larry R. Gerlach (review)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USLion of the League: Bob Emslie and the Evolution of the Baseball Umpire by Larry R. Gerlach (review)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®51442026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Leave While the Party's Good: The Life and Legacy of Baseball Executive Harry Dalton by Lee C. Kluck (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968565
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While the bulk of baseball literature is about players, games, teams, and other on-field activities, relatively little has been written about those behind the scenes who manage and run professional baseball operations. While some may think that a book about a baseball general manager may not make for very scintillating reading, Lee Kluck's biography of Harry Dalton is quite the opposite. It is a very readable book. Drawing upon considerable research, including interviews with baseball people, family members, and others who knew Dalton, this book is remarkable for its thoroughness and penetration into the various aspects of the game as seen through the career of a general manager in charge of many aspects of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallLeave While the Party's Good: The Life and Legacy of Baseball Executive Harry Dalton by Lee C. Kluck (review)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USLeave While the Party's Good: The Life and Legacy of Baseball Executive Harry Dalton by Lee C. Kluck (review)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®76152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Under Jackie's Shadow: Voices of Black Minor Leaguers Baseball Left Behind by Mitchell Nathanson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968566
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Baseball fans know Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947. Within twelve years, there were Black players on every MLB roster. Even after the second generation of minority players established themselves as integral to the game, racism in the sport persisted. Nowhere was this as clearly seen as in the minor leagues, where even at best, conditions have always been less than ideal.In Under Jackie's Shadow, Mitchell Nathanson gives readers a glimpse into what life was like for Black minor league players from 1961 through 1980. Through interviews with thirteen former Black minor leaguers, readers learn, "What was it like to play for white coaches and scouting directors from the Jim Crow South
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallUnder Jackie's Shadow: Voices of Black Minor Leaguers Baseball Left Behind by Mitchell Nathanson (review)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USUnder Jackie's Shadow: Voices of Black Minor Leaguers Baseball Left Behind by Mitchell Nathanson (review)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®78672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O'Brien (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968567
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Having starred in the newspaper era, experienced his fall near the apex of cable, and sought redemption in the age of the internet, it is conceivable that more has been written about Pete Rose than any other athlete. Despite this, Keith O'Brien's New York Times bestselling Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, is likely the best-written and researched book addressing Pete Rose. O'Brien provides a compelling portrait of Rose and the intersecting currents in baseball and culture that corresponded with his fame. It is a work that should appeal to those with little knowledge of the Rose saga while simultaneously maintaining the interest of others already quite familiar
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallCharlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O'Brien (review)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USCharlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O'Brien (review)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®107032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Ballplayers on Stage: Baseball, Melodrama, and Theatrical Celebrity in the Deadball Era by Travis Stern (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968568
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Exploring the relationship between baseball and theatre1 during the late 19th century and the early 20th century Deadball Era (1908–1920), Travis Stern's Ballplayers on Stage focuses on the ways in which players' direct participation in staged melodramas served both to influence the public perception of the professional game and to reinforce or counter the individual players perceived public personae. To do so, Stern presents readers with five case studies, looking closely at the dramatic stylings of Adrian "Cap" Anson, Mike "King" Kelly, Ty Cobb, and Edward "Rube" Waddell, as well as Christy Mathewson's turn as a playwright. Stern, an Associate Professor of Theatre History and Dramatic Literature at Bradley
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallBallplayers on Stage: Baseball, Melodrama, and Theatrical Celebrity in the Deadball Era by Travis Stern (review)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USBallplayers on Stage: Baseball, Melodrama, and Theatrical Celebrity in the Deadball Era by Travis Stern (review)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®105962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Cracks in the Outfield Wall: The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas by Chris Holaday (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968569
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Much like Reggie Jackson's 2024 comments detailing his experiences as a Black man and ballplayer in Birmingham twenty years after Jackie Robinson's major league debut, Chris Holaday's Cracks in the Outfield: The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas reminds readers that racial integration in and out of baseball was a messy, lengthy, and painful process. Through his identification of the limited instances in which Black ballplayers attempted to play or were allowed to play baseball in otherwise segregated communities in North and South Carolina, Cracks in the Outfield pays tribute to those Black ballplayers who challenged color lines in baseball and the Carolinas during the three decades prior to passage
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallCracks in the Outfield Wall: The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas by Chris Holaday (review)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USCracks in the Outfield Wall: The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas by Chris Holaday (review)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®82012026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball. The Spokane Indians and a Tragic Bus Crash That Changed Everything by Eric Vickrey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968570
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The bus crash that tragically altered the 1946 baseball season for the minor league Spokane Indians was a horrendous event that shattered lives both physically and mentally.Like most minor league teams, the roster was filled with names no one was going to remember for their baseball skills, though there were a few exceptions.Readers could shrug and say this was sad, but who cares? It is a terrible moment in history, like many more horrific moments. Why is this one special?That is where Eric Vickrey's writing shines. He spends much of the book detailing each person who was on the bus on the faithful night it rolled off the side of a road in the Cascade Mountains. A substitute driver was at the wheel, and instead of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallSeason of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball. The Spokane Indians and a Tragic Bus Crash That Changed Everything by Eric Vickrey (review)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USSeason of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball. The Spokane Indians and a Tragic Bus Crash That Changed Everything by Eric Vickrey (review)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®78062026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27The Wizard of College Baseball: How Ron Fraser Elevated Miami and an Entire Sport to National Prominence by David Brauer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968571
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For most readers, picking up a baseball biography includes an expectation of a deeper dive into the life of a player, coach, umpire, or some other notable figure in the game. And while David Brauer's The Wizard of College Baseball: How Ron Fraser Elevated Miami and an Entire Sport to National Prominence does give readers some insight into who Fraser was as a person, this book might be better described as a biography of a college baseball program.Though it might be hard for some of baseball's younger fans to imagine, there was once a time when college baseball had little to no media presence on the national level. Not only were regular-season games not televised nationally, but in the early 1980s, even the College
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/143/image/coversmallThe Wizard of College Baseball: How Ron Fraser Elevated Miami and an Entire Sport to National Prominence by David Brauer (review)2025-08-27text/htmlen-USThe Wizard of College Baseball: How Ron Fraser Elevated Miami and an Entire Sport to National Prominence by David Brauer (review)2025-08-272025TWOProject MUSE®78082026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-27