Book Review: Gmelch, G. and Nathan, D. (2017). Baseball Beyond Our Borders: An International Pastime.

Gmelch, G. and Nathan, D. (2017). Baseball Beyond Our Borders: An International Pastime. 1st ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Baseball Beyond Our Borders is a revised version of Baseball Without Borders, a 2006 anthology of sixteen essays on the game as manifested in fourteen countries (listed below).  Writers were given the opportunity to develop their own interests and approaches and as a result the reader is treated to everything from encyclopedia-like historical overviews, to first-person research accounts, to political analysis of international baseball labor markets.  Most readers are sure to find something they like, as well as something they don’t.

The new book features updates on the previously published work, as well as eight new essays focusing on several countries where baseball is a niche sport, and unlikely, as the writer on New Zealand concludes, of “becoming anything more than a relatively minor sport with a passionate following.” Tasmania is included here, it seems, because one of the editors did some academic field work on the island unrelated to baseball.  While South Africa and Israel have made appearances in the quadrennial World Baseball Classic (WBC), and Israel has moved up in world rankings, the sport in those countries remains of marginal interest to most residents or citizens, and in Finland hardly exists at all.  Readers are instead treated to perhaps one of the more offbeat and interesting essays in this collection, an introduction to pesäpallo, an invented game based on baseball, but very different from it.

A new essay on the WBC brings the book to a sobering close. While many readers might imagine the WBC as a grand assembly of nations in celebration of the game, Robert Elias suggests (as does William W. Kelly in his chapter on Japan) that it functions instead as a global stage on which to promote Major League Baseball, as well as a venue for showcasing non-US talent that can afterwards be brought (more appropriately, bought) into the MLB fold.  Rather than internationalizing baseball, MLB is using WBC to internationalize its brand.

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Countries, states and territories covered (essays new to the 2017 version in bold): Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Venezuela; China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan; Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania; Israel; South Africa; Finland, Great Britain, Holland, Italy; World Baseball Classic.

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Book review: Weber, B. (2009). As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires

Weber, B. (2009). As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires. New York: Scribner.

Recently retired, Bruce Weber was a New York Times reporter who thought it would be fun to write a story about schools that train umpires for professional baseball.  He was not a sports writer – his background is in theatre and the arts – but he had some personal interest in the game and a willingness to explore, so he spent a few days at Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring observing, and thereafter published his first writing on baseball (“The Inner Ump”).  His curiosity piqued, he researched and wrote two more articles, one in which he travelled with a Double A umpiring crew as they worked small ball parks across the US midwest (“Minor League Umpires Wait for the Big Call”), and the other in which he visited big league stadiums to observe and interview Bruce Froemming, then the senior umpire in the major leagues (“Umpire Revels in the Calls, and in Getting Them Right”).