Book Review: Ring, J. (2015). A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball

Ring, J. (2015). A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

A Game of Their Own is an oral history of the American female baseball experience as told by ten members of the 2008 Team USA. The interviews were conducted by Jennifer Ring, a professor of Political Science and the Director or Women’s Studies at the University of Nevada.  Ring knows her subject well.  Besides writing a history of American women in baseball, her own daughter was a member of Team USA and experienced many of the difficulties outlined in this book.

In summary, the problem is this.

While American females may play coed baseball as preteens, once they reach adolescence they are largely shut out of any opportunity to continue playing baseball.  They may be offered inducements to switch to softball, which they can continue playing into their young adult years and for which they may even be awarded university scholarships. They are not legally prohibited from playing on high school baseball teams or in independent leagues, but coaches and parents often conspire against them in favor of boys, who have well established paths to collegiate and professional careers. The U.S. Baseball Federation Inc. (USA Baseball) aids in organizing and sponsoring a female team for international tournaments, but American women are always at a disadvantage for having to cobble together ad hoc teams, many composed of present or past softball players. Their rivals at these events — the Japanese, Australians, Canadians, and Venezuelans —  field teams comprised of women who have played coed or all-female baseball since childhood in countries that have local, regional, and national baseball tournaments for females.  Basically, American women are not allowed to play the game they love because there is no institutional support for coed or female leagues within the United States. 

Review: Gómez, C.G., 2007. A New Perspective on Mexican Baseball Origins (and others)

Baseball in California 1860s

Where did baseball come from?

Finding out requires quite a lot of careful work.  MLB’s official historian spent a lifetime on the subject and concludes the game as we know it is a tapestry woven from traditions and practices from across 19th century America.  There are obvious and documentable turning points, but no clear beginning.

The same is true of baseball in the USA’s southern neighbor. In the most recently published account of the game there, historian Jorge Iber concedes, “It is challenging to document baseball’s origins in Mexico.”

No one, it seems, thought it worthwhile to record the arrival of something so ephemeral.  After all, it’s just a stick-and-ball game, a rudimentary feature of many cultures and nothing likely to attract anyone’s attention – until years later, once the game has grown into a profit-generating business.

Want to pay to watch Japanese baseball? You can't!

NPB has to be one of the most short-sighted professional sports organizations in the world.  At the conclusion of another season, here's the letter I have sent.  Unfortunately, it's identical to last year's letter.

============================

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am an overseas fan of yakyuu who would like to have access to all NPB games, regular and post-season.  At present, I can purchase streaming/VOD rights to games only of the Pacific League.  This means I can watch only half of NPB teams, only half of interleague games, and nothing at all of the Central League Climax Series or the Japan Series.

If you have a look across the internet, you will find the following baseball leagues offer streaming/VOD packages:

• MLB (USA)
• MLB Minor (USA)
• LMP (Mexican Pacific League, winter)
• LMB (Mexican Baseball League, summer)
• CPBL (China Professional Baseball League, Taiwan)
• KBO (Korean Baseball Organization)
• ABL (Australian Baseball League)

Why does a leading country such as Japan still not offer such service to fans worldwide?  If even small leagues on three continents have managed to offer affordable, easy access to _all_ their games, why not the NPB?

For the moment, I rely on fans uploading content to file sharing sites to avail myself of Central League games and the Japan Series.  I would be happy to pay for a quality product, but at the moment there is _none_.  I hope by the 2018 season NPB will resolve what issues remain in order to better serve their customers.

Best regards,

Book review: Kalmon, J. (2007). Magic, Miracles, and Mexican Baseball: The Amazing 2005 Season of Los Leones de Yucatan.

Kalmon, J. (2007). Magic, Miracles, and Mexican Baseball: The Amazing 2005 Season of Los Leones de Yucatan. 1st ed. Merida, Mexico: Self-published.

Mexican baseball seems like a tremendously rich field of inquiry, both the sport and the wider culture in which it thrives. This is one of the few English texts on the subject, and I’m sad to say it leaves much to be desired.  It is quite obviously a vanity project, available to audiences outside the Yucatan only through the author, who twelve years after it was published is still fulfilling orders from Mexico or through her family in the USA. Contact details are provided below.

Kalmon is an American expat in Meridia, home to one of Mexico’s professional baseball teams, the Los Leones de Yucatan. She writes in colloquial North American English, a conversational style similar to a blog post. Like many blogs, the text is presented for the consumption of a small circle of intimates. She telegraphs her intention early:

Season's end at Pacific League TV

This is pretty much the same as last year's letter submitted when I cancelled my season viewing pass.  I hope I don't have to say the same again at the end of the 2018 season.

--------------

I have been a subscriber to PA League TV for the 2016 and 2017 seasons and am writing to let you know how pleased I have been with your service. I hope to renew my subscription for the 2018 season. Please keep up the good work.

Here are a few changes I would like to suggest.

Allow controls at full screen. The present software removes all video controls when the full-screen option is engaged. This can be frustrating whenever there is need to pause, fast-forward, rewind, or adjust volume.

Add 10 second forward/reverse buttons. These would be a huge help in navigating through a game, most especially if we can use the forward and back buttons on the keyboard to navigate through the video.

Add condensed games. MLB VOD service offers games in four formats: Live Stream, VOD Full Game, VOD Condensed and VOD Highlight. The highlight film is similar to what you already offer at PA TV. The condensed film runs 10-15 minutes, depending on the level of action in any particular game. All of the relevant plays are shown, though not every pitch, nor every out. There is no commentary on the audio track. (Search [condensed game] at youtube for examples.)

Add a Facebook share button to video clips. At present, only a Twitter button is available. FB is by far a wider network, one which the Pacific League can use to promote its brand through attractive and interesting video clips.

Finally, bring us the Nippon Series! Those of us overseas have no access apart from illegal streams.

Thank you for your attention to this letter and thank you again for a wonderful service. My last wish is that the NPB offer a streaming service for both leagues.

Yours sincerely,

Book review: Morris, P. (2007). Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball.

Morris, P. (2007). Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Modern readers may take it for granted that the playing fields of professional baseball stadiums all look pretty much the same. It wasn’t always that way. Home field advantage once meant more than being in familiar surroundings supported by loyal fans. It could also mean knowing where the furrows were under the tall grass, or that you could safely bunt because the foul lines had been molded to keep balls in play. Such were the conditions of play at the turn of the 20th century. How we got from there to here, though the lives of two landscaping brothers, is the ostensible arc of Morris’ book. It sounds inviting, and offers quite a lot of detail of interest, but in the end is a history that reveals how little we actually know.

Morris is something of a prolific baseball researcher and writer, with five other books to his name, most published in the first decade of the 2000s. His directness and clarity make for easy reading. Unfortunately, his subject is not well represented in the literature and Morris is repeatedly left to speculating, both on his subjects, and on many causes of changes to landscaping practices.

Book Review: Reaves, J. (2002). Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia.

Reaves, J. (2002). Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

Although a bit old by now, this is still the only English book-length treatment of the history of baseball in Asia.  A number of anthologies, such as Baseball Without Borders or Diamonds Around the Globe, cover the development of baseball within the national borders of single countries, including most of those reviewed here, but none of them cover Asia as a region.  Unfortunately, Reaves does not either.  It seems he tires, but for whatever reason – demands of the publisher, requirements of his thesis adviser, or difficulty in conceptualizing the approach – he falls back on a country-by-country review. The manuscript began life as a PhD thesis in Philosophy, a field not known for engaging with sport. Those disinterested in or averse to discussions on the nature of existence, knowledge, or ethics need not worry; there is nothing of this in Reaves’ book (suggesting the University of Hong Kong has a rather broad conception of philosophy).

Atlanta’s SunTrust Park: Bussing in the help

On a recent trip to Atlanta, I had a chance to visit the Braves’ new home, SunTrust Park.  It’s a lovely facility, but unfortunately terribly inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t live in the new neighborhood.  Since relocating to Atlanta in 1966, the Braves played in middle of the city, a location convenient to citizens on all sides of what has become a congested metropolitan area and one served by both train and bus.  The new stadium can be reached only by very long bus rides and is located at the intersection of two overcrowded interstate highways in an overdeveloped area full of malls and office parks. Parking is scattered around the stadium in a number of small lots, some as far as a 20-minute walk.  The demographics of Braves baseball are obvious at the stadium, where most of the customers are white, but a large part of the help is not (in a city that is 48% white, according to the 2010 census).  On a walk around the facility, I spoke with a young black female doing customer relations work who noted that she and many of her coworkers – all part-time, hourly staff – are bussed in from one of the city’s train stations.  Is it that those willing to work for Braves wages in sufficient numbers are not the people living in the vicinity of the stadium, and those that are willing cannot afford private transport to the stadium?  Might be some interesting research for a baseball anthropologist!

More about the SunTrust boondoggle here:

Stealing home: Atlanta Braves and Cobb County kick out neighborhood residents
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/stealing-home-atlanta-braves-and-cobb-county-kick-out-neighborhood-residents-2016-11-18

Cobb County And The Braves: Worst Sports Stadium Deal Ever?
https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/qkyk3v/cobb-county-and-the-braves-worst-sports-stadium-deal-ever

Book review: Withers, E. (2005). Negro League Baseball: Photographs by Ernest C. Withers. 2005.

Withers, E. (2005). Negro League Baseball: Photographs by Ernest C. Withers. 1st ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

When Ernest C Withers returned to Memphis after service in WWII, he decided to set up his own commercial photography business.  He had started practicing while in high school, improved his skills in the military, and hoped as a civilian to serve his community taking photos of whatever might be needed.  He shot weddings, funerals, church and school functions, portraits, business openings – anything and everything to help his business grow and support his wife and eight children.  In this book’s introductory essay by Daniel Wolff, Withers notes he was no baseball fanatic.  If a better paying job was available, he wouldn’t be found at the ballpark.

But the ballpark was not without its financial rewards.  In the 1940s, baseball was perhaps the largest black owned business in the United States and Withers found a way to make himself useful to the Martin family, owners of the Memphis Red Sox, providing baseball images for publicity posters, calendars, and newspapers. When he wasn’t busy elsewhere, Withers was at Martin’s Stadium, where he was not only an image maker, but also a retailer of pictures of teams, players, and even spectators.

For the Martin family and the owners of Negro League baseball teams, Withers’ photos were vital proof of the capability of the African American community.  Images depicting contract signings in well-appointed offices, teams in pressed white uniforms, and players riding shiny team busses were evidence that African Americans could be as successful as their white counterparts.

A Saitama encounter

The author, Iwaki-san, Matuskawa-san

Matsukawa-san said, Why don’t you come and sit next to me?  The people who own these seats never come, he claimed.  We took him up on his offer, Iwaki in the center, Matsukawa and I on either side.  Good thing, too, because Matsukawa had a rough way of speaking that was not easy to understand and Iwaki could help explain if required.

During the game itself (a win for the Lions against the last-place Marines) I didn’t interact much Matsukawa, but we spent a good 40 minutes in conversation on the train back to Ikebukuro.  A man of odd jobs who worked 23 years as a truck driver, he claimed to have no family, which is I suppose why he had the means for season tickets, regular transport from Gunma prefecture, and hotels in Ikebukuro during every home stand, 73 games a season.  He claims to have been a Lion’s fans from a young age, back when they belonged to Nishitetsu, the Kyushu rail company.

How did a kid in Kanto grow up being a fan of a team so far away in an age when there was only newspaper and a few channels each on television and radio?  It seems he was something of the contrarian.  Everyone he knew loved the Giants, and so he wanted to be a fan of some other team.  I’m not sure why he settled on the Lions, but it turned out to be a good choice as they ended up moving to Saitama, far closer to Gunma than Fukuoka.  He remembered the Lions playing at Heiwadai, a stadium that has since been torn down, but whose name remains attached to a park and a track-and-field venue. We spoke a bit about Fukuoka, since I used to live there and know a bit about it, and he warned that the Hawks was becoming the Pacific league version of the Giants, a team fronted by a huge corporation with the money to buy the best team, year after year, and thereby thwart the aspirations of other teams and communities. Since retiring Matsukawa has travelled to a number of stadiums up and down the peninsula, from Kyushu to Hokkaido, and hopes someday to visit the US to see some live MLB games, and maybe even to Korea and Taiwan for some pro-league Asian games.

#

A Nagoya encounter

Ueda-san was an average-looking, middle-aged Japanese guy with a full head of hair and a Chunichi Dragons jersey on his back.  He arrived just as the game began and sat to my right at the end of the aisle.  He didn’t say a thing, just rummaged around in his bag and took out a container of yakisoba, which he proceed to devour in a few quick bites before sitting back to watch the game. Between innings I started making small talk and before you know it Ueda-san felt free to unburden himself on the stranger sitting next to him at Nagoya Dome.  I subsequently learned about his wife’s recent death to cancer, his children’s marriages, and his desire to someday visit all the baseball stadiums in Japan and walk the Shikoku pilgrimage.  At one point he realized how he had been going on and apologized for taking advantage before literally offering me the shirt off his back.  As a long-time fan of the Dragons, he had dozens of jerseys, he said, and he felt like I should have this one on the occasion of my first visit to Nagoya.  He had a smartphone, but he insisted he didn’t have email or Facebook and that we should confine our relationship to these few hours at the ballpark.  Maybe we’ll meet again someday somewhere, he said.  Maybe we will.

#

Film: Dream Chaser, a story of Chinese baseball

Baseball does not yet have wide appeal in China.  In a country with a population four times that of the US, it has only six teams in its nascent professional league.  If you were a young man in China with a love of baseball, the choice between university and sport might be a difficult one to make.

The subtitles in the first few minutes are cut off a bit at bottom but still readable.

Enjoy.

I'm not sure how to embed media from Chinese websites, so here's the easy solution---follow the link:  http://sports.le.com/news/963125019.html

 #

Interview with MLB Advanced Media

No, not a job interview.  Actually, I am planning on moving and have been doing job interviews, which is why I haven't posted much here of late, but I'm a teacher, not a market researcher or analyst.  That's who I seemed to be speaking with yesterday.  The interview was led by a young white man by the name of Scott, and was observed by five other men whom I never met, heard from, or saw.  Only their names appeared in the video-chat software as logged-in to our group (which is why I assume they were men -- they all had typically male names).  The interview was scheduled for thirty minutes and lasted twenty-five.

Why did they want to speak with me?

Book review: Thorn, J. (2014). Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game.

Thorn, J. (2014). Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. 1st ed. New York: Simon & Schuster.

This is not a suitable introductory text to the origins of baseball.  Readers without the appropriate background will very quickly find themselves wading through a veritable sea of names, dates, claims and counterclaims, much of it presented out of chronological sequence, and a fair portion made of up of extensive extracts from primary documents.

The book opens at the turn of the 20th century with a commission tasked with tracing the origins of baseball.  Thorn then moves in and out of narratives, back and forth across this point in time, to examine the commission’s collected documents and determine what was overlooked, or perhaps deliberately ignored, in reaching the now debunked claims for baseball having been invented by Abner Doubleday in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York.  It’s an interesting tale, and Thorn has obviously done his research, but this is clearly a book for those who might have a stake in the story, or how it is told.  A book, in other words, for historians and researchers.

Special Instructions to Players

Almost every chapter in Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden contains a historical oddity worth a bookmark -- or a blog post.  In this case, the league's Special Instructions to Players.  Thorn sets the scene:

In the National League, [John T.] Brush tried to introduce reforms and to punish miscreants, partly from conviction and partly because he thought it made business sense. ... League attendance figures, stagnant on a per-club basis, worried him. At a league meeting in March 1898, Brush pushed through a resolution to “suppress obscene, indecent, and vulgar language on the ball field by players.” It passed unanimously, and then a shocking secret memorandum was delivered by hand to each of the twelve clubs and perhaps each league player—its obscenity made it undeliverable by ordinary mail without risk of federal prosecution—detailing precisely the language that had been complained of in the previous year.

Rooting for Laundry

Rooting for Laundry from Melel Media on Vimeo.

I'm in the midst of John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden, a wonderfully informative, entertaining and evocative book. Thorn's voice and phrasing have obviously been influenced by a lifetime reading Victorian-era sources, which he quotes liberally throughout, and he brings to his topic a breadth of knowledge that extends beyond the period, the sport, or the country.

In a discussion of the commercialization of baseball, for example, he notes one of the first occasions for what had been until then locally stocked teams taking on paid players from outside the community.  In 1869 the Cincinnati Base Ball Club hired an almost entire roster of outsiders, leaving its supporters to "root for the laundry."  The quotation is from a comment made by comedian Jerry Seinfeld about the utter emptiness of the modern professional sports team, in which players and managers regularly change from season to season, in which owners move teams from city to city, and whose only enduring feature is the uniform.

Thorn goes on to note such a phenomenon was not unknown to the ancients, quoting Pliny the Younger on the chariot races of 2000 years ago:

“If indeed it were the swiftness of the horses, or the skill of the men that attracted them, there might be some pretense for it [the passion of the crowd]. But it is the dress they like; it is the dress that takes their fancy. And if, in the midst of the course and the contest, the different parties were to change colors their different partisans would change sides and instantly desert the very same men and horses whom just before they were eagerly following. . . . Such mighty charms, such wondrous power reside in the color of a paltry tunic!”

# 

The provincial character of fandom

In an effort to speed up play and perhaps attract new custom, MLB management has proposed new rules for extra-inning play.  For the purpose of this discussion, the rule itself is irrelevant.  What is of interest is the reaction among aficionados.  The most commonly published view seems to be that it’s a silly idea, especially as it will affect so few games.  At least one writer, though, has argued the idea is worth trying – but not in major league games.  His argument is that such games “matter,” while minor league or amateur league games do not.  He speaks of being “invested” in major league games, and describes other contests, such as the WBC tournament or the All-Star game, as “fun” or “enjoyable,” but not contests about which one “cares.”  

What, we might ask, does he mean by being invested?  What makes one set of players in one context “matter” more than players in another?  They are both, after all, playing the same game, by (largely) the same rules. It could be proposed that US major league baseball is something of a global standard-bearer and therefore its games are of greater importance than all others, but this is really nothing more than argument from tradition.  From the earliest days of baseball’s global diffusion, teams have been fielded equal to or better in talent than US teams. I assume the investment of which the writer speaks is emotional and linked, among other things, to the time spent learning about a particular team or league, and on feelings of belonging to a collective of enthusiasts from a common locale. The investment is in identity, which could theoretically be given to any team, anywhere.  The argument seems to boil down to: Don’t change my favorite league, the one that matters to me.  

Photo:  Prince Seibu Dome, Saitama, Japan.

#

Article Review: Joseph, Gilbert M. "Forging The Regional Pastime: Baseball And Class In Yucatan". 1988.

Players Hacienda Yaxcopoil 1924

Joseph, Gilbert M. "Forging The Regional Pastime: Baseball And Class In Yucatan". Sport And Society In Latin America. Joseph L Arbena, ed.. 1st ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. 29-61. Print.

This is something of a classic in the literature of Mexican baseball studies.  I’ve seen several references in my reading, most recently in Klein’s Baseball on the Border.  However, as the paper appears to have been published only once in a 1988 collection of essays on Latin American sport, it seemed I might never have a chance to read it.  Thankfully used copies are currently not that expensive and several online booksellers have it in stock.

What Joseph sets out to demonstrate is why baseball is far more popular in Yucatan than other areas of Mexico and how this happened.  The latter turns out to be clearer than the former. While there is still no undisputed account of the introduction of baseball into Mexico, there seem to have been several contact points, including the Yucatan, which lies closer to Cuba than it does to Mexico City.  Joseph remains uncertain about the lines of diffusion, but feels that Cuba was the touch-point, specifically Cuban immigrants escaping revolutionary turbulence of the latter 19th century.  He notes the game was picked up in Meridia in the 1890s by what was then a very small segment of the population, the children of urban barrio dwellers.  Concomitantly, baseball was enjoyed by the fad conscious sons of the planting class, many of whom may have learned the game while studying at US boarding schools.  But it was most certainly not played by the large majority of the Yucatan population, which consisted of rural labor strictly controlled by the planters and rarely the beneficiary of planter largess, such as leisure time or sports facilities.  Organized baseball in this early period was the province of the planter families, who had the time and resources to devote to constructing fields and viewing stands, importing equipment, and managing a league.  But when their support shriveled along with the world economy, so too did the fortunes of baseball.

Book review: Klein, Alan M. Baseball On The Border. 1997.

Klein, Alan M. Baseball On The Border. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Though published twenty years ago, this study remains intriguing and perhaps instructive in how to operate sport franchises across cultural and national divides.  It tells the story of Los Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos), a Mexican baseball team that from the mid-1980s to early 1990s represented bordering cities in Mexico and the United States.  The team split its home schedule between a Mexican and American stadium, and as is typical of Mexican league teams, featured a number of American players on its roster.  Shortly after completing research for this book, the binational project collapsed.  Writer/researcher Alan Klein explains this failure largely in terms of structure.  Owners and managers were entirely Mexican and employed a largely conservative philosophy:  field a good team and attendance and finances would take care of themselves.  No one on the Mexican side seemed to understand the Tecolotes as a cultural phenomenon that could be sold to audiences far beyond the Laredos, “a binational phenomenon more as ideology than as fact, and it was in the distinction between the two that the relationship failed.”