Review: Antolihao, L. (2012). "From baseball colony to basketball republic: postcolonial transition and the making of a national sport in the Philippines."

Antolihao, L. (2012). "From baseball colony to basketball republic: postcolonial transition and the making of a national sport in the Philippines."  Sport in Society, 15:10, 1396-1412.

The Philippines at the turn of the last century presents an interesting case study in the cultural diffusion of sport.  Occupied for nearly half a century following the Spanish American war, US troops, businessmen, educators and missionaries introduced both baseball and basketball.  One thrived, the other did not.

What might account for this?

Book Review: Fitts, Robert K. Remembering Japanese Baseball. 2005.

Fitts, Robert K. Remembering Japanese Baseball. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

If you don’t know much of the sport as it developed in Japan, Remembering Japanese Baseball is probably not the best place to start learning.  It consists of transcribed interviews with 25 former players in Japan’s professional baseball league, ranging in time from the pre-war era to the late 1990s.  Of the 25 interviews, only five are with Japanese.  The title is a bit misleading, like a book called Remembering American Baseball containing interviews with players from Latin America and Asia.

Since publishing this collection in 2005, Fitts has gone on to write three books on Japanese baseball history:  a biography of the first American to play in Japan, the first Japanese to play in the US, and an account of Babe Ruth’s visit to Japan.  Remembering Japanese Baseball might be considered Fitts’ first notes for those projects, the groundwork that led him to and informed future research and writing.