Benjamin G. Rader - Baseball: A History of Americas Game

GENERAL

As befits the subject, baseball's literature is immense. For those seeking more complete bibliographies than this one, see Myron J. Smith, comp., Baseball: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1986, 1998), and Baseball Bibliography, 4 vols. (2005). For a current guide to baseball's extensive historical literature, consult NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, which also contains valuable articles on the history of the game. The Web has become the easiest way to access and search a wide range of baseball subjects. See, for example, the SABR Web site, www.sabr.org. Libraries especially notable for their holdings in baseball history include the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Library in Cooperstown, New York, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress, but students of the game may find important collections in their local libraries as well. For baseball historiography, see Larry R. Gerlach, Not Quite Ready for Prime Time: Baseball History, 19831993, Journal of Sport History 21.2 (Summer 1994), Warren Goldstein's delightful, Thirty Years of Baseball History: A Player's Notes, Reviews in American History 38.4 (Dec. 2010), and Richard Peterson's Extra Innings: Writing Baseball (2001). There are many worthwhile though sometimes pretentious books and essays treating the cultural meaning of baseball. Sample among others the writings of Roger Angell, Thomas Boswell, James T. Farrell, Peter Gammons, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Stephen Jay Gould, Allen Guttmann, David McGimpsey, Michael Novak, Richard Peterson, Jules Tygiel, and George Will.

Recently Web sites such as www.mlb.com, www.baseball-reference.com, www.baseball-almanac.com, and www.seamheads.com have mostly supplanted earlier hefty tomes as compendiums of statistics as well essays about the game, but both John Thorn, Total Baseball (2004) and Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer, eds., The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, 5th ed. (2008), remain extraordinarily useful reference works. Those intrigued by the use of statistics in baseball history should begin with the extensive writings and statistics generated by Bill James, especially The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (1988, 2001). While not a sophisticated statistician, James writes with a flair and has not only effectively challenged some of the game's hallowed conventions, but he also invented the term sabermetrics. The term honors the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), organized in 1971, and describes what is done by those who use social science methods to research baseball as it is played. (For what is sometimes described as the analytics revolution in baseball, see the final paragraph of this essay.) For a history of how baseball statistics have developed, see Alan Schwarz, The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics (2004). Much of Robert Kemp Adair's The Physics of Baseball, 3rd edition (2002) is accessible to the untutored.

Except for Albert Spalding's America's National Game (1911, 1992), the republished Alfred H. Spink, The National Game (2000), and Francis C. Richter, Richter's History and Records of Baseball (1914), serious general histories of baseball are rather recent. Among the more successful one-volume histories consider James, The Bill James Historical Abstract, previously cited; Leonard Koppett, Koppett's Concise History of Major League Baseball (1998); Fred Lieb, The Baseball Story (1950); Charles Alexander, Our Game (1991); and Joel Zoss and John Bowman, Diamonds in the Rough (1989). For scholarly essays, see John Dreifort, ed., Baseball History Outside the Lines: A Reader (2001); Jules Tygiel, Past Time: Baseball as History (2000); Donald G. Kyle and Robert B. Fairbanks, eds. Baseball in America & America in Baseball (2008), that includes my take on Ty Cobb; John B. Wiseman, ed., Joy in Mudville: Essays on Baseball and American Life (2009); and Tristram Potter Coffin's The Old Ball Game (1971), a neglected but pioneering book on baseball folklore and fiction.

Baseball has three multivolume histories. Exceptionally rich in detail and understanding of the organizational side of the game's history are Harold Seymour's