Spalding's World Tour: The Epic Adventure That Took Baseball around the Globe—And Made It America's Game (review)

Late-nineteenth-century baseball was a dynamic institution. Persons attracted to it recognized both an opportunity for personal profit as well as the adulation of the public. It became a road to wealth and status in which the public was generally supportive. Baseball in the 1880s was actively defining, as was much of American industry, its precarious relationship between management and labor. Baseball was similar to the rest of industry except that the worker—that is, the player—had, at least to their own perception, a more integral role in the production of the game than a typical industrial worker had in the production of an ingot of steel.

By the late 1880s, labor and management were contesting for a greater percentage of the fruits of the game of baseball. Early magnates such as Albert Spalding found baseball to be a glamorous and profitable venture. Using the reserve clause and other restrictive means, the owners maintained a strong grip on the game and on the players.

To further his hold on baseball and to foster his expanding empire in the sporting goods business, Spalding came up with an ingenious idea in 1888. He would take the Chicago White Stockings and a cooperative team of All Americans to Australia and New Zealand with the intention of converting the game of baseball into a global sensation. His hopes included being able to sell bats, balls, and other equipment globally; being recognized as the most important emissary for the game; being able to control players by fostering favor with important individuals whom he included on the trip; and generally being considered the most important person in the game.

Lamster's account of the trip, which went well beyond the Antipodes coming back to the United States via India, Egypt, and Europe, is sprightly written with significant detail on each stop and with valid consideration of Spalding's goals and aims as he came in contact with cultures that differed significantly from the United States. Lamster is quite effective at looking into the byplay between Spalding and his magnate-focused management of the National League and contrasting it with the perceptions of John Montgomery Ward and players who believed strongly that they were being shorted in salary and respect. Spalding's trip had carried with it a hope that it might head off labor discontent.

The round-the-world jaunt turned out to be a domestic public relations success. It kept baseball in the press for the entire winter period when it normally received only miniscule coverage. Though The Sporting News disparaged the trip, they covered it. Following the maxim of marketing, the trip made the news steadily, if not always approvingly, throughout the winter months of 1888 and into 1889, climaxing with the early-April return to New York and barnstorming back through the east to Chicago right before the 1889 season opened.

However, the expensive venture did not successfully internationalize the game. Spalding would leave equipment agents in New Zealand and Australia to promote his game and his sporting goods, but India and Egypt were not successful sites. European countries found the game an interesting spectacle, but never accepted it as their own. The internationalization of the game, displayed in recent years with the World Baseball Classic and other international tournaments, had to wait at least another fifty years before it found fertile soil in Latin America and in Asia.

Ventures like Spalding's trip placed the game squarely within the context of American culture. This trip further cemented America's love affair with baseball. As it turned out, the game was entering one of its rockiest social and economic eras, the 1890s. While Spalding's tour neither prevented the dark period of an enlarged and unwieldy National League in the 1890s nor prevented other elements from financing competing leagues...