Role Of Baseball Research Articles

The Role of Baseball in the Normalization of Cuba-US Relations

The Role of Baseball in the Normalization of Cuba-US Relations

Stealing home: decolonizing baseball's origin stories and their relations to settler colonialism

The sport of baseball has played an integral role in constructing a national identity in the American settler state. This essay analyses baseball's popularization as America's national pastime and its interconnections with the formation of a settler colonial identity that seeks to erase Indigenous presence on Turtle Island. It does so by tracing the roots of baseball's origin stories and their relationship to the creation of an American national identity. By examining the processes of colonialism, displacement, genocide, and xenophobia that characterized the game's early history in North America and delving into baseball's role in governing the boundaries of insiders and outsiders in the national imagination, this essay provokes questions with regard to the possibility of re-imagining the game of baseball in a decolonial context.

Youth Baseball and Colonial Identity in Taiwan, 1920–1968

In 1968, the Hongye team walked off the baseball diamond as victors and national heroes. Their victory came at the expense of a Japanese team widely reported in the Taiwanese press as champions of the world. The athletes were children, middle-school-aged boys, representing a school in the rural southeast of the island. Their opponents hailed from the same region of Japan, Wakayama, that had produced the Little League World Series champions of the year before. The Taizhong Gold Dragons entered the Little League World Series the following year as Taiwan's first representatives at the competition. They won the championship. As if from nowhere, youth baseball was a major event in Taiwanese public life.' Despite the continuing popularity of baseball in Taiwan--including a domestic professional league, participation in the Olympic games, and high-profile players arriving in the US major leagues--the Hongye team remains the most well-known sports team in Taiwanese history and one of the most fascinating sports teams to study for academics drawn to modern sport in East Asia. The team's signature victory was more than an opportunity for Cold War propaganda grasped by the Republic of China (ROC) government: it signaled a transition in the role of baseball in Taiwanese popular culture from that of a remaining vestige of Japanese colonial influence to a representation of Chinese nationalism. It is interesting that this transition did not occur earlier, with Taiwan's return to the auspices of the ROC in 1945 following Japan's defeat in World War II. Academics frequently discuss sport in terms of its value in promoting political ideologies from the top down in colonial and postcolonial societies. Taiwan is no exception.' Other approaches make the convincing argument that popular sport offered local communities an avenue of resistance within the dominant current of the colonizing nation's cultural assault.' This understanding of sport in colonial and postcolonial contexts can also be limiting. Indeed, Taiwanese youth baseball offers us an alternative model: that of a sporting community directly representing the colonial culture of Japanese seeking to live as members of the extended imperial Japanese cultural demesne. This cultural enclave must be understood separately from binary interpretations of ideological indoctrination and subtle resistance. Popular sport, baseball in this case, gives us insight into the relationship between the core and periphery of the colonial world and the detritus that remains following their severance. (4) A BRIEF HISTORY OF TAIWAN AS COLONY AND REFUGE Japan successfully colonized Taiwan in 1895 following a comprehensive victory in the Sino-Japanese War of that year. Taiwanese colonial life settled into a relatively comfortable pattern of compromise between a landed Japanese elite group and ethnic Chinese locals after an initial period of bloody conflict, though aboriginal communities on the island continued to offer significant violent resistance. (5) The colonial Japanese settled mostly around the newly formed colonial government in the northern city of Taipei. Further south, ethnic Chinese communities predominated alongside vestiges of the pacified aboriginal society. Taiwan was not bereft of opposition to colonial rule, but relations between the Japanese colonial government and local Taiwanese remained remarkably conciliatory in comparison with Japanese experience in Korea following the colonization of that country in 1910. Improvements in the local infrastructure and limited political concessions contributed to a relatively placid political environment in colonial Taiwan. (6) Japanese approaches to integrating the local Taiwanese population into a wider imperial Japanese identity oscillated between assimilation and coexistence. This latter policy prevailed during the early decades of colonization, but Tokyo's growing interest in assimilating the local population accelerated from the 19205 onwards. …

The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962 by Ron Briley (review)

Reviewed by: The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962 by Ron Briley James J. Donahue Ron Briley. The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2011. 214 pp. Paper, $40.00. Ron Briley, editor of two previous collections of essays for McFarland on baseball and American culture, has just published the first book-length critical study devoted solely to the baseball film in postwar America. And while there is much in this volume of interest to popular readers and fans interested in the role of baseball in popular American culture, unfortunately as an academic study this work is of limited value. In the study’s preface, Briley notes that “the baseball film genre of the post-war era was more than just a nostalgic enterprise in which young people [ . . . ] could seek to escape reality” (3). Accordingly, Briley reads the films from the period as evincing the various tensions that had beset postwar American society, in particular tensions related to gender, race, and class. Further, this preface sets up a useful thematic organization for the following films, though this organization is not employed by the study itself. Such an organization, in this reviewer’s opinion, would have strengthened the reading of the films and provided better, more fluid connections between the individual chapters. This is especially the case with the biopics, as Briley is often referencing earlier discussion in his later chapters. Instead, the chapters are arranged mostly chronologically, with the notable exception of chapter 8, “Baseball and Supernatural Intervention: It Happens Every Spring (1949), Angels in the Outfield (1951), and Rhubarb (1951),” a chapter organized thematically by discussing three of the four “supernatural” films included in the study. Other than the resulting length of the chapter, this reviewer sees no reason why the discussion of Damn Yankees (1958) could not have been included in this chapter. In a similar vein, all of the biopics could have been included in one larger section, given Briley’s particular strength in the individual chapters for establishing the importance of the biopic as a subgenre within the baseball film. All that said, there is much value in the discussion of the various movies. The individual chapters (with one exception, noted above) focus on one film and read that film both within the context of American social anxieties of the time as well as against the historical figures and events depicted in the films. This, of course, would be of particular interest to fans of the players whose biopics are included in this study: Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Dizzy Dean, and Jimmy Piersall. It is this reviewer’s opinion that the chapters focusing on biopics are the strongest chapters because they demonstrate the best balance between discussion of the film, situation within social/cultural contexts, and comparison to the historical record. Fans of the individual players whose lives have been depicted (or [End Page 158] romanticized, as Briley smartly demonstrates) in these films will find much valuable discussion in these pages. In short, Briley is at his best as a historian of baseball and American culture. The remaining chapters, unfortunately, do not cohere into a clear thematic pattern, which may be one reason for Briley’s choice to discuss the films (mostly) chronologically. That said, Briley convincingly demonstrates the cultural importance of several films which are often considered little more than mere entertainment by film scholars and popular audiences alike. Films such as Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949) and Damn Yankees explore gender tensions in postwar American culture; films such as The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and Jim Thorpe: All American (1951) force audiences to confront racial tensions in professional baseball as a focal point for American society at large. Similarly, The Stratton Story (1949), The Winning Team (1952), and Safe at Home! (1962) all engage the battle between individual achievement and the merits of teamwork, which Briley smartly connects to the larger cultural response to “the organization man.” There are a couple of instances in this study where Briley’s engagement with the larger discussion of the history and culture, unfortunately, detracts from the discussion of the...

The national pastime trade-off: how baseball sells US foreign policy and the American way

From Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War to George W. Bush and the Iraq War, we can observe baseball's role in developing the American empire, first at home and then beyond US shores. From Albert Spalding and baseball's first world tour to Bud Selig and the World Baseball Classic, we can see the globalisation of America's national pastime, and baseball's missionary role in spreading the American dream. To maintain itself as the American national game, however, baseball has pursued a ‘national pastime trade-off,’ which has brought benefits but has come with a high price for the game. Is it still worth pursuing? This essay will address that question while chronicling baseball's own foreign policy and the sport's involvement in US diplomatic and military history.

How the Shaughnessy Plan Redefined Success in Sports

There were cries of heresy and treason under headlines such as Has Sold Its Soul for Cheap TV Thrills when in 1993 Major League Baseball expanded its postseason structure to double the number of qualifying ball-clubs in both the National and American Leagues.(1) Critics accused baseball of stooping to the postseason greed sported by the three other dominant professional sports, football, basketball, and hockey. is the only major sport where only a champion at the end of the long season qualifies for the opportunity to play for the world title, Joe Giuliotti wrote in the Boston Herald. Now there's a move to dilute its championship format. The new playoff structure will be a world with wild-card races instead of pennant races, a world in which finishing first is worth just a one-game home-field advantage in a best-of-five first round playoff series, Jayson Stark wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The idea literally didn't play in Peoria. Spurred on by lust for lost television revenues and a reckless desire to spur new interest in the game, [baseball] plans to add second-place division wild card teams to form a new tier of postseason games, Bryan Oberle wrote in the Peoria Journal Star. (2) In reality, though, the playoffs that the NFL, NBA, and NHL had so successfully orchestrated to generate millions of dollars in revenue had been originally spawned by baseball--through its minor-league operations--which the other professional sports leagues had merely copied. Very few commentators in 1993 bothered to mention baseball's role in the original creation of the playoff concept back in 1933. New York Times writer Charles Einstein was one who did evoke the memory of the father of the playoff concept. And the name of the mystery man mentioned above? Frank Einstein wrote about the forgotten pioneer of the playoffs. devised a post-season playoff scheme that all of the more than 50 Depression-ridden minor leagues instantly adopted, mainly to save themselves from total collapse. The first four teams in any eight-team league automatically made it into the playoffs?' It had just taken Major League Baseball a little longer than other professional sports to adopt the playoff concept that Shaughnessy had pioneered in the minor leagues six decades earlier. (3) In the 1995 season, for the first time in the more than one hundred years of Major League Baseball, a ballclub without the credential of a first-place finish, the wild card, had a chance to be crowned champion. Indeed, just two years later, the Florida Marlins did capture the National League pennant as a wild-card qualifier, and then went on to win the World Series. By 2004 when the wild-card Boston Red Sox dislodged the Curse of the Bambino and won the World Series, the third consecutive wild-card ballclub to do so, there were few, if any, who felt that the Red Sox were not legitimate holders of the title. Actually, fans loved it. However, one hundred years earlier when the Red Sox won the first modern World Series in 1903, that would not have been the case. Since the formation of the National League in 1876, the champion ballclub in a major league was determined on a winner-take-all basis, rewarding the ball-club with the best win-loss record during the regular season (with just one exception). From 1969 to 1993 (except for the 1981 strike-interrupted year), the leagues had two divisions where the two first-place finishers vied to be league champion. Following the strike-shortened season of 1994, Major League Baseball implemented the cataclysmic change in postseason structure, with the eight-club playoff format described above for the 1995 season. (4) Frank Shaughnessy, general manager of the Montreal International League ballclub in 1933, had cast the seeds of the 1995 change in how league champions were determined in Major League Baseball. Shaughnessy devised a system of postseason playoffs (the Plan) that not only revolutionized how champions were determined but also how success was defined at the highest levels of professional sports. …

The Tragedy of the Ehime Maru and the Role of Baseball in the Healing Process

The Tragedy of the Ehime Maru and the Role of Baseball in the Healing Process Frank Ardolino (bio) The tragedy of the Ehime Maru and its aftermath illustrates an important aspect of human reaction to calamities. Official apologies, culturally sensitive recovery and treatment of the dead, financial settlements, and time all played essential parts in the healing process, but what aided the final reconciliation was young boys from both countries playing baseball. The games played in Japan and Hawaii helped those affected by the tragedy to move beyond it and to forge new ties of friendship and cooperation. On February 9, 2001, at 1:43 p.m., nine miles south of Diamond Head, the famous Honolulu landmark, a terrible naval accident occurred.1 A Japanese fishing trawler, the Ehime Maru, was struck and sunk by a surfacing nuclear submarine, the USS Greeneville. The Ehime Maru was a training boat for future fishermen from the Ehime Prefectural Uwajima Fisheries High School. On board were twenty crew members, two teachers, and twelve second-year students, who were spending a semester on the ship. When the ship was struck by the Greeneville, the sub's rudder hit the hull at the stern where the engine room was located and tore a hole in the five-hundred-ton ship. The crew heard a loud thump, like banging a fifty-five-gallon drum with a baseball bat, and felt the ship shudder; power was lost almost immediately, and water poured into the ship, causing it to sink within ten minutes. Three Coast Guard boats arrived at 2:45, and within fifteen minutes they had rescued twenty-six survivors, who were sick from swallowing diesel oil and were suffering from shock. However, nine people were missing: four seventeen-year-old students, two teachers, and three crew members. Christened on September 17, 1994, the Greeneville, a 360-foot super sub, had a crew of sixteen officers and 126 sailors who served under Commander Scott Waddle, a 1981 Annapolis graduate and the son of a retired Air Force colonel. Waddle seemed destined to become an admiral, but at the age of forty-one his nineteen-year career came to a tragic end when his sub, in executing a test [End Page 80] procedure, hit and sank the Ehime Maru. The major question raised was, in the words of an irate Honolulu resident, how a super sub was "not even capable of locating a ship floating peacefully above it." Japan demanded an immediate inquiry into the causes of the accident, an apology from the United States and Waddle, and an extensive salvage operation to recover the nine bodies. Waddle was immediately relieved of duty, and the Navy ordered that a court of inquiry be established to investigate the causes of the tragedy. Waddle was found guilty of violating articles 92 and 110 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice—dereliction in performance of his duties and negligent hazarding of a vessel. However, the court did not find him criminally negligent, and he was allowed to retire at full rank and pension, further angering Japan. The navy also conducted a $60 million salvage operation, which lasted twenty-one days and recovered eight bodies. The families of the crew members received a settlement of $16.5 million, and the navy paid $11.5 million to Ehime Prefecture for the rebuilding of the Ehime Maru, memorial services, and indemnities for the surviving crew members. Despite the financial settlements and the official apologies, there was a nagging sense that something else needed to be done to provide a more humane denouement to the tragedy. It was decided to hold a four-year home-and-home baseball series between teams from the Hawaiian Babe Ruth Leagues and Ehime Prefecture, ages 11–12 and 13–15. The Ehime-Hawaii Goodwill Baseball Association of Japan made the initial offer to Seiji Naya, director of the Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism, who underscored the importance of the series: "Officials in Ehime are hoping to heal emotional wounds and promote positive relations through the common bond of youth baseball. What's important in this exchange is the healing that person-to-person contact will provide...

Base Lines and Beyond: The National Pastime and Its Meanings

Historian Harold Seymour was correct when, in 1960, he noted that baseball has been badly served by history. Yet, despite this accurate assessment, historians did not heed the call to expand their horizons to include, of all things, sport, as part of the historical saga. Cold War interpretations then dominated historical schools of thought and soon gave way to New Left perspectives as American society struggled with the dynamics of change. The competing interpretations between the orthodox and revisionist schools of thought, for instance, both centered upon one topic: the role of American nationality and its consequences within the framework of a turbulent world.' The study of America from its cultural inside, however, did not emerge until the early 1970s. At that point, historians responded to a host of movements, groups, and episodes that warranted attention in the twilight of an unstable period. To that end, cultural, ethnic, and gender issues won legitimacy as topics to be placed under the historical microscope. Soon thereafter, these histories, too, spawned newer approaches in the quest to find and capture a clear focus on the American spirit and its origins. But what of Seymour's 1960 assertions regarding baseball's role in American history? The profession, a decade later, had yet to accept the national pastime as a topic for serious study. Moreover, those who harbored notions to break further ground in any area of sport often balked. Baseball is not the stuff upon which successful careers in history are normally made, Jules Tygiel determined in his early years as a professional historian. But as scholars of social and cultural history plied their trades, names like Alexander Cartwright, Babe Ruth, and Jackie Robinson proved to be personalities too

Early baseball and the rise of the National League

Did modern baseball spontaneously arise from genius of American people? Did professionalism arise simply from a desire to turn baseball into a business? Did William Hulbert, organizer of National League, really save baseball? These are three of questions examined in this work about early baseball's role in American culture. Beginning with an introduction to sport as achievement and expression, author takes a close look at early demand in New York for the against best in baseball and argues that this demand was contradictory to society's equally persistent demand that displays of the against best be locally accessible. This work offers insights into how baseball operated in its early days, with special attention paid to National Association and how National League came into being.

Past Time: Baseball as History

Few writers know more about baseball's role in American life than Jules Tygiel. In Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, Tygiel penned a classic work, a landmark book that towers above most writing about the sport. Now he ranges across the last century and a half in an intriguing look at baseball as history, and history as reflected in baseball. In Past Time, Tygiel gives us a seat behind home plate, where we catch the ongoing interplay of baseball and American society. We begin in New York in the 1850s, where pre-Civil War nationalism shaped the emergence of a national pastime. We witness the true birth of modern baseball with the development of its elaborate statistics-the brainchild of English-born reformer, Henry Chadwick. Chadwick, Tygiel writes, created the sport's historical essence and even imparted a moral dimension to the game with his concepts of errors and unearned runs. Tygiel offers equally insightful looks at the role of rags-to-riches player-owners in the formation of the upstart American League and he describes the complex struggle to establish African-American baseball in a segregated world. He also examines baseball during the Great Depression (when Branch Rickey and Larry MacPhail saved the game by perfecting the farm system, night baseball, and radio broadcasts), the ironies of Bobby Thomson's immortal shot heard 'round the world, the rapid relocation of franchises in the 1950s and 1960s, and the emergence of rotisserie leagues and fantasy camps in the 1980s. In Past Time, Jules Tygiel provides baseball history with a difference. Instead of a pitch-by-pitch account of great games, in this groundbreaking book, the field is American history and baseball itself is the star.

Baseball and American Cultural Values

Introduction Philosopher Jacques Barzun once observed that anyone wish ing to understand heart and mind of America should study sport of baseball, viewed by many as national pastime. Many writers and historians have echoed support for Barzun's statement, and there has been a proliferation of scholarly literature on sport. Some of America's finest novelists have used imagery of baseball. Thomas Wolfe stated, Is there anything that can evoke spring?the first fine days of April?better than sound of ball smacking into pocket of big mitt, sound of bat as it hits horse hide: for me, at any rate, and I am being literal and not rhetorical?almost everything I know about spring is in it?the first leaf, jonquil, maple tree, smell of grass upon your hands and knees, coming into flower of April (1). While Wolfe's description evokes pastoral nature of baseball's early years, growing mass culture of urban America quickly adopted game as a favorite. The North Carolina writer might have some difficulty with late twentieth century domed stadiums with artificial turf. Baseball seems to embody many of values coming to dominate an urbanized and industrialized America. A number of scholars have suggested that baseball may be perceived as a sort of mirror in which power, politics, fashion, class, econom ics, and race may be viewed in microcosm. In his study of A. G. Spalding and rise of professional baseball in late nineteenth century, Peter Levine argues that creation of professional baseball leagues reflected professionalization of American culture which occurred throughout nation as more white middle class reformers sought to impose some order upon chaos of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization. How ever, in his work on baseball in Progressive Era, Steven A. Riess asserts that while Progressives may have regarded baseball as the epitome of finest American beliefs, traditions, and values, men who actually controlled major leagues were often more like machine politicians with profit motives (2). Some other scholars see baseball as a force for passing along such essential values as hard work, social mobility, democracy, and teamwork. Baseball reveals significant themes like urbanism, technology, class, race, and gender. The inclusion of baseball in history curriculum may gain attention of many recalcitrant students who may find sport history a little more interesting than banking policies of Andrew Jackson. But several important caveats should be attached here. For a sport such as baseball to serve function of analyzing values in microcosm, attention must be paid to larger political, social, economic, and cultural context in which these values are displayed. Accordingly, a study of baseball should not supplant study of American political history, but rather enhance it. Teachers considering using baseball as an expression of American values should see sport as part of a larger cultural unit on role of leisure in American society. Thus, baseball curriculum material could be used as a model for inclusion of other sports. For example, emergence of spectator sports suggests some important revisions in cultural perceptions of gender such as study of women's tennis and women's basketball. Other relevant aspects of sport and leisure history include film, fads, fashion, popular culture and literature, consumption and advertising, exercise, amusement parks, and impact of all these activities on both workplace and family. Baseball might be introduced into curriculum in many ways. First, even though many people view baseball as national pastime, teachers should not assume too much advanced knowl edge of game. The growth of leisure time in late-twentieth century American culture has produced considerable alternatives to baseball. Second, teachers beginning a unit on role of baseball in American culture would do well to start with a brief