Film Review: The Kid from Cleveland. (1949). [film] Directed by Herbert Kline.

This is not a baseball movie.

It is instead a moralizing post-war film about juvenile delinquency among the white, urban working-class as told through the story of freckle-faced Johnny, who rebels against his step-father through acts of petty larceny but is saved by a kindly radio broadcaster who provides Johnny the opportunity to experience wholesome male relationships as the batboy of the 1948 World Series champion Cleveland Indians. In the end, Johnny’s delinquency is entirely down to the mother for holding on too dearly to the memory of Johnny’s deceased father (a martyr to the American Way of Life on an unnamed battlefield of the 1940s), which engenders Johnny’s feelings of jealousy and disdain for the interloping step-father. 

Book Review: Balukjian, Brad. The Wax Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of Baseball’S Afterlife. 2020.

Balukjian, Brad. The Wax Pack: On The Open Road In Search Of Baseball’S Afterlife. 1st ed., University Of Nebraska Press, 2020.

I probably should have read a sample chapter.

The concept is intriguing, a road-trip across the USA to interview former MLB players to inquire about their transition to life outside baseball.  (The conceit of the book title is that subject selection was based on players in a pack of 1986 baseball cards.)  Almost as much as the idea is engaging, though, its execution is disappointing.

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. 

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: 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.

Book Review: Gmelch, George. Inside Pitch: Life In Professional Baseball. 2001.

Gmelch, George. Inside Pitch:  Life In Professional Baseball. 1st ed. Washington [D.C.]: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Print.

This is an extensively researched, sharply observed, well written anthropological account of the lifecycle of US professional baseball players in the 1990s.   It begins with descriptions of the dreams and aspirations of boys, before examining the few well-worn avenues teenagers and young men take to become salaried players.  Succeeding chapters explore the process of acculturation to exclusively male groups devoted entirely to the full-time pursuit of sport, the psychological demands of a game in which the ball is in play only 15 minutes for every three-hour match, the role of superstition, players’ relationships with wives and groupies, and the difficult adjustment to retirement.

Inside Pitch is based on interviews with 107 players, managers, coaches, and scouts conducted by former-minor-leaguer-turned-academic Dr George Gmelch, a professor of Anthropology at the University of San Francisco, author of a book-length account of behind-the-scenes baseball workers (In the Ballpark), and editor of a collection on global expressions of the game (Baseball without Borders).  Gmelch has most recently published an account of the US minor league experience of the 1960s based on journals written while a member in the Detroit Tigers farm system (Playing with Tigers).

Film & Book Review: White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium, 2008 & 2013

White Elephant: What is There to Save? (2008). [DVD] Miami, FL: Joe Cardona, producer, director; Rolando Llanes, director; Cantilever Productions, Kids in Exile Films.

Llanes, R. (2013). White Elephant: The Rise and Fall of Miami Baseball Stadium. 1st ed. San Francisco: Blurb.


This is an odd film.  I came to it through an interest in baseball and my own childhood experience of attending Baltimore Orioles spring training games in the 60s and 70s.

But the film is not really about baseball, nor it seems much about the stadium itself.  It is more a collection of historical vignettes loosely connected to the stadium, which opened in 1949 and was demolished in 2001. The absence of an overarching narrative is confounded by nonlinear sequencing, intermittent poetry reading, and an assumption that the viewer is familiar with the mid-20th century history of Miami, Cuba, and Central America.

Review: Gelber, S. (1983). Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of Baseball

Flickr:  Hastings Historical Society:  Uniontown Baseball Team ca. 1900

Gelber, S. (1983). Working at Playing: The Culture of the Workplace and the Rise of Baseball. Journal of Social History, 16(4), pp.3-22.

Gelber, an historian at University of Santa Clara, argues for a congruence theory of leisure, that hobbies are embedded in, informed by, and mirror the larger social, economic, and political realities (in contrast to compensatory theories, which see leisure as constructed to provide for deficiencies in the larger reality).  Baseball was a product of 19th century industrialization and reflected and reinforced the values of that reality.  It was a game that reflected the transitional nature of a society whose economy demanded specialized labor concentrated in factories, in which work was highly regulated, and depended on the orchestrated effort of a team of workers.

“By concentrating less on the role of nature in baseball and more on the nature of the roles of its players, a very different pattern emerges. The game's attraction lay in its congruence with everyday experience. It was popular because it was similar to, not because it was different from, day to day life. Baseball provided the male business worker with a leisure analog to his job. In the game he experienced social relationships and psychological demands similar to those he knew at work. Indeed, he was working at playing, and by doing so was minimizing dissonance between those two aspects of life. Baseball brought psychological harmony. It appeared to be different from work because it was outdoor play, but underneath it was the same.”  

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