Why Baseball Matters

Author : Susan Jacoby
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300235402
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why Baseball Matters written by Susan Jacoby and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball, first dubbed the “national pastime” in print in 1856, is the country’s most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball’s greatest charm—a clockless suspension of time—is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position—in reality and myth—in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War—when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps—to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online “fantasy baseball” to attending real games. Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather’s bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball’s history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.

Author : Robert W. Creamer
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803264069
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Baseball and Other Matters in 1941 written by Robert W. Creamer and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a baseball book, but whether Creamer intended it or not, it's much, much more."-Sports Illustrated. "[Creamer] recalls this momentous year in baseball and world history. He reprises Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, Ted Williams's .406 batting average, Hank Greenberg and the draft, the furious Dodgers-Cardinals pennant fight, and the ensuing World Series. All this is portrayed against the looming U.S. entry into World War II."-Library Journal. Robert W. Creamer, one of the best and most perceptive writers on baseball, remembers the baseball-and other matters-of 1941 in a tribute to the game that is also part memoir. Creamer was a long-time writer and editor at Sports Illustrated. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including the following Bison Books: Stengel: His Life and Times, Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat, Jocko, and The Quality of Courage.

Author : Mark Kingwell
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781771961530
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fail Better written by Mark Kingwell and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A smart, accessible look into the philosophy of baseball, with a focus on its lessons for a life best lived.

Author : Curt Smith
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 13 : 044655698X
Total Pages : 620 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What Baseball Means to Me written by Curt Smith and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2009-02-28 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Funny, moving, and each one a diamond in the rough of the American consciousness, the essays in this book are the ultimate baseball conversation that pays homage to the perfect sport, in this perfect companion for all our personal baseball journeys. For some people baseball means a memory-of a certain dusty ball field on a certain summer day, or the first time they walked into a major league park and saw the perfect emerald playing field. For some, baseball means one heartbreaking or heroic moment. And for others, it means a father, a friend, or an old flame who shared a game for a day or for a lifetime. To create this marvelous book, more than 150 writers, athletes, celebrities, politicians, presidents, and pundits were asked what baseball means to them. The answers came back with richness, wonder, insight, and poetry. A fascinating portrait of baseball's beautiful nuances, What Baseball means to me marks the greatest collection of original essays ever written about the game. Accompanied by more than 200 classic baseball photographs, the voices in this book bring alive the game in all its venues-in the past and present, in wartime and hard times, in Cuba, in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium. We meet players in a different light: including Paul Molitor returning a baseball to a trusting boy named Dan Jansen, Derek Jeter as depicted by his dad, the Toledo Mud Hens as seen through the eyes of Christine Brennan, and Pedro Martinez talking about baseball as a way of life in his native Dominican Republic. Most of all, we meet ordinary Americans, like the kids Rudy Giuliani grew up with in Brooklyn, or the man in Philadelphia who transforms himself for every home game from mild-mannered Tom Burgoyne to the Phillie Phanatic.

Author : H. A. Dorfman
Publisher : Taylor Trade Publications
ISBN 13 : 1888698543
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mental Game Of Baseball written by H. A. Dorfman and published by Taylor Trade Publications. This book was released on 2002 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, authors H.A. Dorfman and Karl Kuehl present their practical and proven strategy for developing the mental skills needed to achieve peack performance at every level of the game.

Author : John Bloom
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814798810
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sports Matters written by John Bloom and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2002-09 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Most of the contributions strongly project the authors' perceptions of the role of race on their subjects, and essays should elicit lively discussions in the classroom." —CHOICE Frederick Douglass liked to say of West Indian boxer Peter Jackson that "Peter is doing a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question." His comment reflects the possibilities for social transformation that he saw in the emerging modern sports culture. Indeed, as the twentieth century developed, sports have become an important cultural terrain over which various racial groups have contested, defined, and represented their racial, national, and inter-ethnic identities. Sports Matters brings critical attention to the centrality of race within the politics and pleasures of the massive sports culture that developed in the U.S. during the past century and a half. The contributors collected here address such issues as popular representations of blacks in sports. They consider baseball—from Nisei players in Oregon to Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles. And they look at the use of warrior imagery in representations of Native American athletes and the evolution of black expressive style within basketball. Sports Matters challenges our presumptions about sports, illuminating in the process the complexities of race and gender as they relate to popular culture. Contributors include Amy Bass, John Bloom, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Gena Caponi, Montye Fuse, Randy Hanson, Michiko Hase, George Lipsitz, Keith Miller, Sharon O'Brien, Connie Razza, Sam Regalado, Greg Rodriguez, Julio Rodriguez, Michael Willard, and Henry Yu.

Author : John McCollister
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1493048880
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Baseball Book of Why written by John McCollister and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we sometimes refer to a left-handed pitcher as a “southpaw?” Why are major league pitchers normally limited to 100 pitches per game? Why was Jack Roosevelt Robinson the first African-American ever to play as part of an official lineup for a team in Major League Baseball? Why is a baseball field sometimes referred to as a diamond? This book provides over 100 questions and detailed answers concerning the traditions, rules, and history of the national pastime. Organized by the sport’s five eras—Dead Ball, Live Ball, Golden Age, Expansion, and Steroid Era—it answers questions about hitting, pitching, fielding, base running, managing, scouting and ownership that vex even the most ardent fans of the game. Moreover, this book is an appreciation of how baseball’s traditions began.

Author : Andrew Zimbalist
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780815719403
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.0X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book May the Best Team Win written by Andrew Zimbalist and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The business of baseball stands in sharp contrast to the game’s wholesome image as America’s favorite pastime. Major league baseball is a deeply troubled industry, facing chronic problems that threaten its future: persistent labor tensions, competitive dominance by high-revenue teams, migration of game telecasts to cable, and escalating ticket prices. Amid the threat of contraction, existing franchises are demanding public subsidies for new stadiums, while viable host cities are begging for teams. The game’s core base of fans is aging, and MLB is doing precious little to attract a younger audience. According to Andrew Zimbalist, these problems have a common cause: monopoly. Since 1922 MLB has benefited from a presumed exemption from the nation’s antitrust laws. It is the only top-level professional baseball league in the country, and each of its teams is assigned an exclusive territory. Monopolies have market power, which they use to derive higher returns, misallocate resources, and take advantage of consumers. Major league baseball is no exception. In May the Best Team Win, Zimbalist provides a critical analysis of the baseball industry, focusing on the abuses and inefficiencies that have plagued the game since the 1990s, when franchise owners appointed their colleague Bud Selig as MLB’s “independent” commissioner.

Author : Pam Rosenberg
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781592967056
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Baseball Jokes written by Pam Rosenberg and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collections of jokes about baseball.

Author : Alva Noë
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190928182
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Infinite Baseball written by Alva Noë and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...Philosopher and baseball fan Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game. For example, he ponders how observers of baseball are less interested in what happens, than in who is responsible for what happens; every action receives praise or blame. To put it another way, in baseball - as in the law - we decide what happened based on who is responsible for what happened. Noe also explains the curious activity of keeping score: a score card is not merely a record of the game, like a video recording; it is an account of the game. Baseball requires that true fans try to tell the story of the game, in real time, as it unfolds, and thus actively participate in its creation. Some argue that baseball is fundamentally a game about numbers. Noe's wide-ranging, thoughtful observations show that, to the contrary, baseball is not only a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, but is intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths."--Dust jacket flap.