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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Japan Baseball Trip: Buying tickets

Tokyo Giants Ticketing (in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean)

After determining the schedule and making hotel reservations, the next order of business was securing tickets, a process in which I am still engaged.  All Japanese teams have fan clubs that are given priority access to tickets.  Sales to the general public don’t begin until a month or two before game dates (depending on the team), though some Japanese ticketing systems (such as Pia) offer the option to make ticket reservations.  A reservation does not guarantee a ticket, only a place in line.  There are other complications.  Pia, for example, will not accept credit cards issued by a non-Japanese bank.

Planning a baseball trip to Japan

Nippon Professional Baseball

It wasn't a long cherished dream to do a baseball trip to Japan.  It wasn't much of a dream at all. But I'm now just a few weeks away from boarding a plane.  For those who might have such dreams or aspirations, I thought perhaps my experience might be helpful in planning your own trip.

I’m not highly paid, but as a teacher I get long vacations.  Every summer my wife and I visit my family in the US, or hers in Japan.  This summer we’ll be visiting the latter and for the first time in a number of summers I found myself with no research projects or conferences.

While considering what I might do with my time, I bumped into the idea of a baseball tour.  Last summer I had a great day photographing at a US game in Atlanta.  With more available time, I could do the same in Japan many times over. I haven’t visited any Japanese stadiums apart from Fukuoka Dome, at which I attended a couple of Hawks games when we lived in that city.

So, why not?  I may never have a chance like this again.

My trip as scheduled now includes eight games in four stadiums featuring seven teams, plus a day at a fifth stadium for a high school tournament, all over a period of 16 days.

Book review: Gall, J. and Engel, G. (2006). Sayonara home run!: The art of the Japanese baseball card

Gall, J. and Engel, G. (2006). Sayonara home run!: The art of the Japanese baseball card. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

This is at once a beautiful and disappointing book.

The design and layout are superb and do much to highlight its subject, a collection of early to mid-20th century Japanese baseball cards.   Given the quick methods of production and cheap materials used during this period, the cards don’t present well in large format.  Most have been photographed in sets and appear in these pages in groups of anywhere from 4 to 30.  There isn’t much to learn here by looking, apart from acquiring a sense of the visual language used in marketing Japanese popular culture. For a few minutes you can enjoy the sight of Asian men in various poses of playing baseball, outfitted in old-style uniforms labelled with familiar names such as the Giants and Braves, surrounded by exotic text, sometimes rendered in penciled lines and most often presented in garish color.

About midway through there is a wonderful two page spread of a pair of children’s school bags from the 1940s, together with a set of cards found within.  Where did they come from?  Who found them?  Where are they now?  We are left without a clue, and this points to a serious deficiency in this text.  While it contains short essays on Japanese card production that are informative and not to be found in most other sources on Japanese baseball, there is little else here that can’t be found in Wikipedia or other common sources.  In the Further Reading section, the authors recommend the books of Robert Whiting, as well as a couple of other regularly cited sources, but nothing anyone interested in Japanese baseball hasn’t seen elsewhere, nothing that suggests the authors went to any great effort in researching material for this book.  While the cards presented here appear to have come from the personal collections of the authors, you’ll discover this only by looking in the Credits section at the back of the book.  There is no discussion of how or when these cards came into their possession.  There are no interviews with Japanese card collectors, dealers, card manufacturers, no background on the companies that made cards or the people involved in their production, no pictures of cards in situ.   Sayonara Home Run! is, in fact, a photographic collection of cards with a bit of text for the reader who knows nothing about Japanese baseball.

As a visual record, this is a lovely collection. Unfortunately, binding is poor.  The cover quickly separated itself from the text block under normal reading conditions.

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Book review: Klein, A. (1991). Sugarball: The American Game, The Dominican Dream.

Klein, A. (1991). Sugarball: The American Game, The Dominican Dream. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Alan Klein is a Professor of Sociology-Anthropology at Northeastern University who has published extensively on the intersections of sport, economy, politics and culture among Dominicans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and North Americans.  Sugarball was his first book-length project, an investigation of baseball in the Dominican Republic, which since the 1950s has been a regular and frequent supplier of high caliber baseball talent to the US professional league.  

In an Appendix Klein reviews his approach to data collection, which included extended periods of residence in Dominican baseball camps observing and interviewing managers, coaches, and players, teaching English classes to prospects, and following players home on weekends to witness their home life. He also engaged in observation at Dominican ballparks, interviewed fans, and surveyed baseball coverage in the local press.  He does not comment on his Spanish ability except to note that he was sometimes required to carry out interviews in Spanish and occasionally act as translator.  Taken together with his survey of local newspapers, this suggests a high level of fluency.

Book review: Beyond Baseball: Rounding First

Venn, D. (2016). Beyond Baseball: Rounding First. World Beyond Publishing.

Rounding First, the subtitle of this 200-page self-published book, is derived from the name of an American NPO supplying used baseball gear to children in Nicaragua. It has since branched out into other projects, including agriculture and health care. The title, Beyond Baseball, addresses the author’s understanding of his two week experience distributing equipment to teams in Nicaragua. He questions his own presence as a former ballplayer and recent college graduate, as well as the value of sporting goods to a country that has difficulty feeding itself.

The answer to the first question is this book, Venn’s contribution to spreading the word on the good work of Helping Kids Round First. He sent me a copy for review, and now here you are reading about it. Hopefully, you will be curious enough to inquire further, donate, or perhaps join one of Rounding First’s trips. If so, you might also be interested in reading Venn’s account for a more in-depth look at what goes into one of these visits, from collection and shipping of equipment, to sorting, packing, and personally delivering hundreds of kilos of baseball gear. (You’ll also have to read about Venn’s romantic relationships, but thankfully those interludes are infrequent.) Money from book sales goes to Helping Kids Round First.

Book Review: Gmelch and Weiner, J. In the ballpark: The working lives of baseball people. 1998.

Gmelch, G. and Weiner, J. (1998). In the ballpark: The working lives of baseball people. Washington [D.C.]: Smithsonian Institution Press.

This slim volume looks at people usually ignored in baseball or sport books, those behind the scenes who make the on-field drama possible, everyone from the usher to the beer vendor to the general manager.  Produced by a professional anthropologist who was also a minor league player, the book is comprised of oral histories derived from interview transcripts with twenty-one employees of professional baseball organizations in the United States.  Each 8-10 page chapter includes a description of the kind of work performed, the particular challenges of the job, how the person first became involved in the work of baseball, and in perhaps half of the accounts some discussion of salary.