Baseball is much more than the national pastime. It has become an emblem of America itself. From its initial popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, the game has reflected national values and beliefs and promoted what it means to be an American. Stories abound that illustrate baseball's significance in eradicating racial barriers, bringing neighborhoods together, building civic pride, and creating on the field of play an instructive civics lesson for immigrants on the national character.

 

In A People's History of Baseball, Mitchell Nathanson probes the less well-known but no less meaningful other side of baseball: episodes not involving equality, patriotism, heroism, and virtuous capitalism, but power--how it is obtained, and how it perpetuates itself. Through the growth and development of baseball Nathanson shows that, if only we choose to look for it, we can see the petty power struggles as well as the large and consequential ones that have likewise defined our nation.

 

By offering a fresh perspective on the firmly embedded tales of baseball as America, a new and unexpected story emerges of both the game and what it represents. Exploring the founding of the National League, Nathanson focuses on the newer Americans who sought club ownership to promote their own social status in the increasingly closed caste of nineteenth-century America. His perspective on the rise and public rebuke of the Players Association shows that these baseball events reflect both the collective spirit of working and middle-class America in the mid-twentieth century as well as the countervailing forces that sought to beat back this emerging movement that threatened the status quo. And his take on baseball’s racial integration that began with Branch Rickey’s “Great Experiment” reveals the debilitating effects of the harsh double standard that resulted, requiring a black player to have unimpeachable character merely to take the field in a Major League game, a standard no white player was required to meet.

 

Told with passion and occasional outrage, A People's History of Baseball challenges the perspective of the well-known, deeply entrenched, hyper-patriotic stories of baseball and offers an incisive alternative history of America's much-loved national pastime.

Whether loved or reviled, the New York Yankees have had an impact on American culture that extends well beyond baseball. Since the early twentieth century, movies, novels, memoirs, pop songs, and even TV sitcoms have either dealt directly with the Bronx club and its star players or incorporated key elements of Yankee iconography. In Pinstripe Nation, Will Bishop explores the myriad ways in which the Yankees and their successes (and spectacular failures) became interwoven with the nation’s larger cultural narrative. 

In 1920, with their acquisition of Babe Ruth, the Yankees rose to prominence. With his power-hitting style attracting legions of new fans, the “Great Bambino” became a national hero of the Roaring Twenties. In contrast to Ruth’s flamboyance, his less flashy successors Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio captured the spirit of striving and courage that carried America through the Depression and WWII years. The Pride of the Yankees, a popular movie celebrating Gehrig’s career, and the Hemingway novella The Old Man and the Sea, whose protagonist reveres DiMaggio, typified the trend. 

Mirroring the nation’s postwar swagger and confidence, the club of the Mickey Mantle–era remained hugely popular, but “Yankee hating” set in as well. Novels like Mark Harris’s The Southpaw and Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant signified a widespread resentment of the team’s outsized dominance. Amid the national turmoil of the 1960s, the Yankees also went into decline. In the following decades, as player salaries soared and team infighting grabbed headlines, the once-glowing portrayals of the team gave way to tell-all books like Ball Four and The Bronx Zoo. Yet, as this informative and entertaining book amply shows, the Yankees have, through all their ups and downs, retained a hold on the American imagination unmatched by any other sports franchise. 
 

 

An admirer of Pirate president Barney Dreyfuss, prolific baseball writer Frederick G. Lieb consorted with the club’s biggest stars, christened the legendary Dreyfuss “the first-division man,” and produced The Pittsburgh Pirates, one of the fifteen celebrated histories of major league teams commissioned by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s. Originally published in 1948, Lieb’s history ranges from the ball club’s earliest professional days in the late nineteenth century as the Pittsburgh Alleghenies to its spring training session in preparation for the 1948 season, a span that included six National League pennants and two World Series championships, as well as a loss to the Boston Red Sox, then the Pilgrims, at the inaugural World Series a century ago.

“This reprint of Fred Lieb’s The Pittsburgh Pirates is an invitation for baseball readers to enjoy Lieb’s wonderful stories of the great Pirate teams of the first half of the twentieth century,” writes Richard “Pete” Peterson in the new foreword to this edition. “Lieb’s book is rich with accounts of World Series triumphs and disappointments, of epic encounters on the playing field, like that between Wagner and Cobb, of mutinies in the clubhouse, of courageous comebacks, and of devastating defeats, including the infamous ‘homer in the gloaming.’”

In Lieb’s personable and anecdotal prose, honed over the course of his sustained sportswriting career, the book conveys “baseball drama of the highest order,” including the pre-Dreyfuss days of Captain Kerr, Ned Hanlon, and Connie Mack; Dreyfuss’s dynasty in the early twentieth century; the dramatic World Series triumphs of 1909 and 1925; the end of the Dreyfuss era and the sale of the club to a syndicate headed by John Galbreath and Bing Crosby; and the purchase of Hank Greenberg and the emergence of slugger Ralph Kiner. Aided by twenty-five black-and-white photographs, this rare history revisits the glories and stories of “fabulous old Pirates” such as Honus Wagner, Tommy Leach, Fred Clarke, Babe Adams, Max Carey, Kiki Cuyler, Pie Traynor, Paul and Lloyd Waner, and Arky Vaughan.

It happens every summer: packs of beer-bellied men with gloves and aluminum bats, putting their middle-aged bodies to the test on the softball diamond. For some, this yearly ritual is driven by a simple desire to enjoy a good ballgame; for others, it’s a way to forge friendships—and rivalries. But for one short, wild-haired, bespectacled professor, playing softball in New York’s Central Park means a whole lot more. It's one last chance to heal the nagging wounds of Little League trauma before the rust of decline and the relentless responsibilities of fatherhood set in.

Professor Baseball is the coming-of-middle-age story of New York University professor and Little League benchwarmer Edwin Amenta. As rookie manager of the Performing Arts Softball League’s doormat Sharkeys, he reverses softball’s usual brawn-over-brains formula. He coaxes his skeptical teammates to follow his sabermetric and sociological approach, based equally on Bill James and Max Weber, which in the heady days of early success he dubs “Eddy Ball.” But Amenta soon learns that his teammates’ attachments to favorite positions and time-honored (if ineffective) strategies are hard to break—especially when the team begins losing. And though he rejects the baseball-as-life metaphor, life keeps intruding on his softball season. Amenta here comes to grips with the humiliation of assisted reproduction, suffers mysterious ailments, and finds himself lingering at the sponsor’s bar, while his partner, a beautiful but baseball-challenged professor, second-guesses his book in the making. Can he turn his team—and his life—around?

Packed with colorful personalities, dramatic games, and the bustle of New York life, Professor Baseball will charm anyone who has ever root, root, rooted for the underdog.