Playing for keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century. Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades.

The 20th anniversary edition of goldstein's classic includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s and an account of his experience as a scholarly consultant during the production of Ken Burns's Baseball. In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen.

Used book in Good Condition. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees.

Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy

In this gripping account of one of the most important steps in the history of American desegregation, Jules Tygiel tells the story of Jackie Robinson's crossing of baseball's color line. Examining the social and historical context of robinson's introduction into white organized baseball, Roy Campanella, Tygiel also tells the often neglected stories of other African-American players--such as Satchel Paige, Willie Mays, both on and off the field, and Hank Aaron--who helped transform our national pastime into an integrated game.

The anniversary issue features a new foreword by the author. Drawing on dozens of interviews with players and front office executives, contemporary newspaper accounts, and personal papers, Tygiel provides the most telling and insightful account of Jackie Robinson's influence on American baseball and society.

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The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America's Game

Sneered at as the beer and whiskey circuit” because it was backed by brewers, distillers, beer at the ballpark, their American Association brought Americans back to enjoying baseball by offering Sunday games, and saloon owners, and a dirt-cheap ticket price of 25 cents. The womanizing, wildly generous von der ahe and his fellow owners filled their teams' rosters with drunks and renegades, egocentric, and drew huge crowds of rowdy spectators who screamed at umpires and cheered like mad as the Philadelphia Athletics and St.

Louis Cardinals. Chris von der ahe knew next to nothing about base¬ball when he risked his life's savings to found the franchise that would become the St. It is a classic american story of people with big dreams, no shortage of chutzpah, and love for a brilliant game that they refused to let die. Louis browns fought to the bitter end for the 1883 pennant.

In the summer of beer and whiskey, and boozing, competition, Edward Achorn re-creates this wondrous and hilarious world of cunning, set amidst a rapidly transforming America. Yet the german-born beer garden proprietor would become one of the most importantand funniestfigures in the game's history. Von der ahe picked up the team for one reasonto sell more beer.

Then he helped gather a group of ragtag professional clubs together to create a maverick new league that would fight the haughty National League, reinventing big-league baseball to attract Americans of all classes.

Shoeless Joe

What follows is both a rich, love and family, nostalgic look at one of our most cherished national pastimes and a remarkable story about fathers and sons, and the inimitable joy of finding your way home. More than the inspiration for the beloved film field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe is a mythical novel about “dreams, life, magic, and what is quintessentially American” Philadelphia Inquirer.

160;“if you build it, he will come. 8221; these mysterious words, inspire ray kinsella to carve a baseball diamond in his cornfield in honor of his hero, spoken by an Iowa baseball announcer, the baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson. Mariner Books.

The Diamond in the Bronx: Yankee Stadium and the Politics of New York

Timed to be released at the start of 2008 spring training, neil Sullivan's The Diamond in the Bronx chronicles the entire history of a stadium that has been home to the greatest dynasty in sports history, a stadium that will see its final Yankees game in 2008. As yankee stadium is about to become a memory, an era when small children could ride the subway, sullivan tells how yankee stadium came to be built in 1923, Neil Sullivan's The Diamond in the Bronx offers a fascinating account of its history and its position at the intersection of sports, government, business, alone, at a time when the Bronx was a burgeoning borough that held middle class housing for immigrants as well as hunting lodges for wealthy Manhattanites, an indelible part of the cultural history of baseball and of New York City, and society, to the ball game, and when many of the ballplayers themselves lived on the Grand Concourse.

. For yankee fans, and anyone interested in the increasingly vexed relationship between sports, baseball aficionados, The Diamond in the Bronx offers a wealth of detail, and politics, insight, business, and historical perspective. The resulting stadium controversy tells us much about the public's changing views of government and the changing nature of professional sports.

As the city and the bronx changed, yankeedom changed too, and the stadium is now surrounded by of parking lots, symbolic of the team's suburban fan base and the decline of the South Bronx. Mariner Books. In recent years the team has threatened to leave New York City, prompting extravagant proposals for keeping it there, including a billion dollar new stadium in Manhattan to be financed with public money.

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October 1964

His time and effort researching the book result in a fluency with his topic and a fluidity of writing that make the reading almost effortless. Absorbing. San francisco Chronicle"Wonderful. Memorable. Halberstam describes the final game of the 1964 series accurately and so dramatically, I almost thought I had forgotten the ending.

The washington Post Book World"Superb reporting. Incisive analysis. You know from the start that Halberstam is going to focus on a large human canvas. One of the many joys of this book is the humanity with which Halberstam explores the characters as well as the talents of the players, coaches and managers. It should be a hit with younger students of the game, who'll eat up the vivid portrayals of legends like Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris of the Yankees and Bob Gibson and Lou Brock of the Cardinals.

Louis Cardinals. Most of all, however, david halberstam's new book should be a hit with anyone interested in understanding the important interplay between sports and society.

Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle Cultural Studies of the United States

American football began in the 1870s as a game to be played, not watched. From forty yards upfield the quarterback releases the ball; it spirals in an elegant arc toward the goalposts as the receiver now for the first time looks back to pick up its flight. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public spectacle with an immense following, a phenomenon caused primarily by the voluminous commentary about the game conducted in popular newspapers and magazines.

Is football an athletic contest or a social event? is it a game of skill, a former professional player, or merely an organized brawl? Michael Oriard, asks these and other intriguing questions in Reading Football, a test of manhood, the first contemporary book about football's formative years. He shows how football became a series of cultural stories about power, luck, strategy, and deception.

. This familiar tableau, epitomizes the appeal of the sport: the dramatic confrontation of artistry with violence, this exemplary moment in a football game, both equally necessary. Mariner Books. Oriard shows how this constant narrative in football's early years developed many different stories about what the game meant: football as pastime, as a science, as the sport of gentlemen, as a game of rules and their infringements.

. The pass is a little high; the receiver leaps, stretches, grasps the ball--barely, fingers clutching--at the very moment that the safety drives a helmet into his unprotected ribs. According to oriard, televised football now plays a cultural role of enormous importance for men, yet within the field of cultural studies the influence of football has been ignored until now.

The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America

Sullivan of boston had become the nation's first true sports celebrity, an American icon. An up-to-date bibliography ensures that The Manly Art will remain a vital resource for a new generation. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise was illegal.

Used book in Good Condition. The likes of poet vachel lindsay and novelist Theodore Dreiser lionized him―Dreiser called him 'a sort of prize fighting J. It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. Morgan'―and ernest thompson seton, founder of the Boy Scouts, noted approvingly that he never met a lad who would not rather be Sullivan than Leo Tolstoy.

From the afterword to the Updated EditionElliott J. When first published in 1986, expanding scholarly boundaries by exploring masculinity as an historical subject and by suggesting that social categories like gender, the book helped shape the ways historians write about American sport and culture, class, and ethnicity can be understood only in relation to each other.

This updated edition of gorn's highly influential history of the early prize rings features a new afterword, gender, the author's meditation on the ways in which studies of sport, and popular culture have changed in the quarter century since the book was first published. Mariner Books. But a generation later, toward the end of the century, the great John L.

PEOPLE OF PROWESS: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America Sport and Society

Mariner Books. Used book in Good Condition. Will be shipped from US. New copy. Used book in Good Condition. Fast shipping.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

And then came billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. Used book in Good Condition. What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed.

But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, smartest, really, win so many games?" with these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, and most contrarian book since, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, well, the Oakland Athletics, since Liar's Poker.

Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers—numbers!—collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors.

He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win. How can we not cheer for David?"One of the best baseball—and management—books out.

Past Time: Baseball As History

Used book in Good Condition. We begin in new york in the 1850s, where pre-Civil War nationalism shaped the emergence of a "national pastime. We witness the true birth of modern baseball with the development of its elaborate statistics--the brainchild of English-born reformer, Henry Chadwick. Few writers know more about baseball's role in American life than Jules Tygiel.

Tygiel offers equally insightful looks at the role of rags-to-riches player-owners in the formation of the upstart American League and he describes the complex struggle to establish African-American baseball in a segregated world. Instead of a pitch-by-pitch account of great games, in this groundbreaking book, the field is American history and baseball itself is the star.

In past time, jules Tygiel provides baseball history with a difference. Mariner Books. Used book in Good Condition. Sabr metrics. Chadwick, tygiel writes, created the sport's "historical essence" and even imparted a moral dimension to the game with his concepts of "errors" and "unearned" runs. In baseball's great experiment: jackie Robinson and His Legacy, Tygiel penned a classic work, a landmark book that towers above most writing about the sport.

Now he ranges across the last century and a half in an intriguing look at baseball as history, and history as reflected in baseball.