The National Game: Baseball and American Culture

Rossi delivers a brisk, straightforward overview of baseball's evolution, following popular developments that have altered both the game and the business since the sport's inception as a popular hobby more than 150 years ago. He argues that baseball, more than any another sport and many national institutions, is intrinsically linked to American social change because its evolution has been shaped by so many of the issues that affected a modernizing America: labor relations, ethnicity, class, race, the economy, the power of the press and the significance of tradition. Rossi follows developments within the game and then suggests how these have helped or hurt it in the eyes of the fans, using both anecdotal information and broad statistical categories like attendance records and organization profits. Individuals are less important here than trends. Club owners, in all their varieties, show up throughout baseball history as active forces in this evolution, sometimes unknowingly, often unwillingly. Business decisions change tradition (the Brooklyn Dodgers move West) and even play (the American League adds the designated hitter to match National League attendance levels). Well-read fans of both baseball lore and American history may find that the overview approach results in significant gaps and generalizations, and there is little discussion of baseball's impact on American culture. Rossi, who teaches American history at La Salle University, is more interested in the story of baseball's style of evolution--how baseball reacted to the economic or social state of the nation, and how the game fared with fans in the wake of those reactions. (Mar.)