The Farmer’s Game: Baseball in Rural America by David Vaught

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Farmer’s Game: Baseball in Rural America by David Vaught Charles Klinetobe David Vaught, The Farmer’s Game: Baseball in Rural America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 232 pp. $29.95. In The Farmer’s Game: Baseball in Rural America, David Vaught examines the role of baseball in rural communities. Vaught argues that baseball and baseball historians have overly focused on the Major Leagues which has, in turn, overly focused their attention on the big cities and thereby improperly excluded small towns and rural spaces from our understanding of the history and evolution of the game. “Rural baseball,” writes Vaught, “needs to be understood in its rural context, not as a by-product of the developing urban-professional game” (11). Vaught makes no claim to the slender book being comprehensive or capturing the complexity of how baseball expresses the myriad of communities and cultures in rural America. He instead defines the book as “exploratory and suggestive rather than definitive or comprehensive.” (10) As such, the book is organized around six wholly independent essays exploring the role of baseball in rural communities. The most compelling of these examines baseball in Texas cotton country where it became important, and imbued with different meanings, in German, Czech, Latino, and Anglo communities. Vaught’s research is impressive. He provides more than forty pages of notes for 151 pages, of text, along with a bibliographical essay. He demonstrates an immersive command of a variety of sources, including court cases and small town newspapers. For more recent subjects, such as Bob Feller and Gaylord Perry, Vaught also conducted a number of interviews. Vaught points to Jules Tygiel’s maxim that to write good baseball history, one must first take their eye off the ball (150). Unfortunately, at times, the ball can get somewhat lost which can leave the book somewhat uneven. Vaught can write, often quite wonderfully, of the intertwined lives of the Coopers and Doubledays in upstate New York and the economic transformations brought by the Erie Canal, but there is nary a baseball to be seen. This leaves the posited connection between baseball and communities feeling sometimes tenuous, particularly as the myth of baseball being created by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown has been long discredited, though Vaught indulges in a speculative journey to reduce it to a possible misunderstanding. This can also be a reflection of the lack of available sources, which may also serve to push the study to the urban and professional games. Furthermore, while Vaught argues that rural [End Page 104] baseball needs to be understood on its own terms, further exploration of its connections to the urban game may be warranted. Vaught writes that in 1877, a year before the formation of the National League, players in rural Texas were already emulating the style of traveling professionals who had barnstormed through the region. Also, in the early urban and professional game, teams and players who were unsophisticated or crude in their play were referred to as “country.” This may not be a comfortable connection between the urban and rural game, but it is worthy of exploration. At their best, sports are an expression of community and culture. In The Farmer’s Game, David Vaught explores this expression in a handful of rural communities. While it is neither comprehensive or final, it is a worthy contribution. Charles Klinetobe University of Nebraska–Omaha Omaha, Nebraska Copyright © 2018 Paul Mokrzycki Renfro