front cover of Breaking into Baseball
Breaking into Baseball
Women and the National Pastime
Jean Hastings Ardell. Foreword by Ila Borders
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

While baseball is traditionally perceived as a game to be played, enjoyed, and reported from a masculine perspective, it has long been beloved among women—more so than any other spectator sport. Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime upends baseball’s accepted history to at last reveal just how involved women are, and have always been, in the American game.

Through provocative interviews and deft research, Jean Hastings Ardell devotes a detailed chapter to each of the seven ways women participate in the game—from the stands as fans, on the field as professionals or as amateur players, behind the plate as umpires, in the front office as executives, in the press box as sportswriters and reporters, or in the shadows as Baseball Annies. From these revelatory vantage points, Ardell invites overdue appreciation for the affinity and talent women bring to baseball at all levels and shows us our national game anew.

From its ancient origins in spring fertility rituals through contemporary marketing efforts geared toward an ever-increasing female fan base, baseball has always had a feminine side, and generations of women have sought—and been sought after—to participate in the sport, even when doing so meant challenging the cultural mores of their era. In that regard, women have been breaking into baseball from the very beginning. But recent decades have witnessed great strides in legitimizing women’s roles on the diamond as players and umpires as well as in vital management and media roles. In her thoughtfully organized and engagingly written survey, Ardell offers a chance for sports enthusiasts and historians of both genders to better appreciate the storied and complex relationship women have so long shared with the game and to glimpse the future of women in baseball.

Breaking into Baseball is augmented by twenty-four illustrations and a foreword from Ila Borders, the first woman to play more than three seasons of men’s professional baseball.

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front cover of Cardinal Memories
Cardinal Memories
Recollections from Baseball's Greatest Fans
Edited & Intro by Tina Wright
University of Missouri Press, 2000

Heralded by local and national media as perhaps baseball's most devoted followers, the lovers of St. Louis's legendary Redbirds have a special bond with their team. Cardinal Memories: Recollections from Baseball's Greatest Fans celebrates this relationship by focusing on the people in the stands. A collection of essays gathered from around the world, from St. Louis to Hong Kong, Cardinal Memories forms a history of the team the way it is best remembered—through the eyes and hearts of its fans.

By turns funny and poignant, these stories chronicle Cardinal teams and players from the Gashouse Gang to the Swifties, from El Birdos to Whiteyball and Big Mac. The bond between parent and child, the generosity of numerous players, and the power of a single game to unite thousands of people are only a few of the themes that run throughout this remarkable collection. Whether it's the tale of young fans clamoring at a bus stop for a glimpse of Stan the Man, a surprise gift from the "Mad Hungarian," or Mark McGwire's "71st" home run, these vignettes capture the joy, heartbreak, and passion of being a Cardinal fan.

Focusing on the game's emotional appeal, Cardinal Memories is about more than baseball—its evocative tales capture the game's deeper meanings and offer readers an affectionate slice of Americana. Transcending Cardinal country, these touching stories will appeal to baseball fans and sports enthusiasts everywhere.

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front cover of Shakespeare and Baseball
Shakespeare and Baseball
Reflections of a Shakespeare Professor and Detroit Tigers Fan
Samuel Crowl
Ohio University Press, 2024
Shakespeare and baseball are monuments of high and popular culture: Shakespeare is the most widely read and staged playwright in the world, and baseball is America’s game. Professor Samuel Crowl, a prize-winning teacher and international scholar of Shakespeare on film, explores his life as a champion of the Bard and a fan of the Detroit Tigers. He saw his first Tigers game in the summer of 1950 (Hal Newhouser beat the Chicago White Sox) and his first Shakespeare play in 1953 (Alec Guinness as Richard III at Ontario’s Stratford Festival) and has spent almost seventy-five years enjoying and writing about the pleasures of play that each provides. Shakespeare and Baseball is an unusual hybrid combining Crowl’s education as a Shakespeare and baseball fan, the resonances he perceives between the playwright and the game, the unexpected pleasures both forms of play have afforded his extended family of children and grandchildren, and a selection from the seventy letters he has written to them about Tigers games he has seen, from old Tiger Stadium, Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, and ballparks in Cleveland. Crowl finds unexpected connections between his twin subjects, including beer, which funded and fueled both the establishment of Major League baseball clubs, like the Yankees and Cardinals, and the creation of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, visited by Shakespeare enthusiasts from around the world. A deeper linkage is that Shakespeare’s festive comedies kept the ideas, rituals, and customs of rural England alive in the dense urban world of Elizabethan London, just as baseball kept the image of the garden—the rural American past in which the game took shape­—alive in the twentieth-century American city. The book is written in a style that captures what one reader has called Crowl’s “warm, rich midwestern voice” and will be of interest to fans of the game and of the Bard, from high schoolers on up.
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front cover of Your Brain on Cubs
Your Brain on Cubs
Inside the Heads of Players and Fans
Edited by Dan Gordon
Dana Press, 2008
White Sox fans were overcome with euphoria when their beloved team won after eighty-eight years of failure, and the long-suffering Red Sox Nation finally received their vindication in 2004. Now the Cubs are the only “cursed” team left: The team has repeatedly made the playoffs without ever winning the World Series for the last ninety-nine years, and yet thousands who bleed Cubbie blue pack Wrigley Field for every game. The reasons why ardent sports fans in Chicago and around the world buy expensive game tickets and memorabilia, fill stadiums, and live and die by their team’s fortunes is the subject of Your Brain on Cubs, an engaging study that delves into why sports engender such passionate emotions in us all.

            A group of today’s leading science writers and neuroscientists explore here the ways that our brain functions when we participate in sports as fans, athletes, and coaches, taking baseball as the quintessential sport for all three perspectives. The contributors tackle such questions as: How does a player hit a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball when he barely has time to visually register it? Why do fans remain devotedly loyal year after year? And what allows them to believe in superstitions, such as a curse? Other topics investigated in the book include how a ballplayer’s brain changes as he gains experience and expertise, why there are a higher percentage of left-handers in the major leagues compared to the general population, and the ethical implications of neurological performance enhancement.

            An expertly written and thought-provoking read, Your Brain on Cubs challenges us to reevaluate the nature of the sports fan and the athlete, revealing the scientific complexity underlying the seemingly black-and-white world of wins and losses.

 
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