The National Game; Baseball and American Culture

Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. ix, [3], 243, [1] pages. Illustrations. Preface; Origins of the Game; Baseball as Big Business, 1876-1891; Coming of Age, 1891-1908; The Wars of Baseball, 1909-1918; Golden Age, 1919-1931; Baseball in Depression and War, 1931-1945; No Golden Age: Baseball, 1946-1960; Coming Apart, 1961-1977; Best of Times, Worst of Times, 1978-1994; The Future of the National Game, Notes. A Note on Sources, and Index. Dr. John Patrick Rossi La Salle College High School, received his B. A. in history from La Salle College in 1958, his M. A. from Notre Dame in 1960, and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. He began teaching at La Salle College in 1962; was associate editor of "Four Quarters"; received the Lindback Award; developed popular classes on World War II, baseball history, and George Orwell; and served as History Department chair. He has published many works on the British Liberal Party, baseball history, Orwell, and other topics. After retiring, he received the honorable title "Professor Emeritus. John Rossi offers not only an expert overview of baseball over the past 175 years; he shows how the game has reflected and contributed to changes in American society over time. The National Game chronicles baseball's popular successes and financial failures; its interleague wars and continuing struggles between owners and players; and its accommodations to radio and television, without neglecting the colorful players and managers who have won the hearts of fans. A succinct, knowledgeable synopsis...recommended.--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post. As a part of popular culture, sport has made a deep impression in American life. And nowhere is this clearer than in baseball, the game that seems to transcend generations and has made its way into our language and literature. The country grew up playing baseball, Mr. Rossi notes, but the professional game took hold in the cities of the Northeast just as the nation was transforming itself from a rural to an urban society. Essentially a middle-class attempt to create a club sport, the game began early on to integrate immigrant groups, and over the years it became an important pathway to acceptance for all kinds of outsiders. For a readable, concise history of the game and its place in American culture, Mr. Rossi's book is hard to beat. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: 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 more than 150 years ago. He argues that baseball, more than any another sport and many national institutions, is intrinsically linked to 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. 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 and even play (the American League adds the designated hitter). Rossi is 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.