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.

MLB Team Color Schemes

Red and Blue.  It seems almost every MLB team has one and many have both.  How many?  Someone's already done the work. Check out the Sports Design Blog. 

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159 ways to hit the ball

Puck, 1913.  Artist: Crawford, Will

The following list appears in Zack Hample's Watching Baseball Smarter (2008).  The author provides no citation, and as a search for the list name returns nothing, I assume for now it is his own compilation, a wonderful testament to the human need for novelty (and penchant for cataloging).  

159 WAYS TO HIT THE BALL 

Squib, squirt, nub, chop, 

Drive, line, send, pop. 

Lift, loft, lace, lash, 

Scald, slice, serve, slash. 

Slap, swat, belt, smack,

Loop, bloop, bounce, whack. 

Fist, flare, muscle, mash, 

Deliver, doink, unload, smash. 

Book review: Klein, A. (2014). Dominican baseball: new pride, old prejudice

Klein, A. (2014). Dominican baseball: new pride, old prejudice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

I finished this book just before leaving for a longish vacation filled with diversions a bit more appealing than writing a book review.  I didn’t want to let the reading pass, though, without saying a few words about an informative text that marks the end of a quarter century of baseball research in the Dominican Republic.  Klein’s first book, Sugarball (1991), was an ethnographic account of the sport on the Caribbean island in the mid to late 80s, including extensive discussion of the developing system of buscones and the MLB’s increasing interest in the country as a source of cheap and highly skilled labor.  In the interviewing years, Klein published several papers on Dominican baseball, as well as a book length project on baseball in a Mexican border town, in addition to research into the North American body-building subculture, and sport among Native American communities.

New pride, Old prejudice is something of an update rather than a full-blown ethnography, an analysis of the economic and political developments between the MLB and Dominican baseball.  While there are many irritants in the relationship, Klein concludes that the biggest problem appears to be the inability to agree on what constitutes a problem. The MLB, for example, sees the buscones as a nuisance, one to be reined in to create a more rational (and less expensive) labor supply.  Dominicans, on the other hand, are likely to see the buscones, in the absence of a strong government, as the actors most likely and most able to protect Dominican interests and procure appropriate levels of financial compensation for Dominican ball players.  It’s not clear how these issues will be resolved, but Klein feels that the fortunes of the Dominicans and the MLB are now tied so closely to each other that the two will sink or swim together.

For a lengthier look at this book, please see Dain TePoel’s review at Sport in American History:  https://ussporthistory.com/2014/10/06/review-of-alan-kleins-dominican-baseball-new-pride-old-prejudice/

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Japan Baseball Trip: More Tickets

Buffaloes online ticketing

Single tickets for Japan’s pro-league games are released in blocks, both to groups and across time.  Fan club members get first choice, and some weeks later, usually one to two months before game date, remaining tickets are released to the general public.

When I left off, I was waiting to purchase tickets for August games of the Eagles and Buffaloes. I was a bit worried about availability during holiday events, the Eagles during Sendai’s largest annual festival, Tanabata, and the Buffaloes on Yamanohi with last year’s champions and this year’s leading team, the Hawks.

As it turned out, there were plenty of seats available for both and the only inconvenience with the online order systems was being forced to input my name in kanji.  Foreign credit cards were not a problem.

I chose to print my own tickets.  The Buffaloes' system was somewhat easier;  the Eagles seemed especially cumbersome, requiring 1) entering a receipt number, 2) then on a succeeding page entering my email address, 3) checking my email for a link to a ticket, 4) saving the ticket as a pdf, then finally 5) printing the ticket.

All that’s left now is to get to the stadiums on the appointed dates, eight in all.

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Book review: Gmelch, G. (2006). Baseball Without Borders: The International Pastime

Gmelch, G. (2006). Baseball Without Borders: The International Pastime. University of Nebraska Press.

The editor of this collection of 16 authors on baseball in 14 nations is a cultural anthropologist at Union College and University of San Francisco (as well as a former minor league player) and has written two books on baseball culture, Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball, and In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People. As only Japan and Cuba are represented by more than one essay, most writers take a broad historical perspective, so you can think of this collection as a global history of baseball. Writing is uneven but largely readable for a general audience.

For those wishing to skip the details, the concluding chapter provides a useful summary of findings. The Americans were not solely responsible for the global diffusion of the game, but were abetted by the Japanese, who took baseball with them to Taiwan and Korea, as well as by expatriate Cubans, who brought the game back from the US and then spread it across the Caribbean, most notably Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Spalding’s late 19th century world tour introduced the game to other corners of the world, and apart from Sri Lanka and Egypt, the game took root in all the other countries visited. (An investigation of these two outliers might provide interesting clues as to the intersection of the game and its audience, much as Kaufman and Patterson’s study of cricket in North America.) While baseball was part of the cultural baggage of invaders and colonizers, it was often used as a vehicle for the weaker party to assert its national and cultural identity. On the ball field, Koreans and Taiwanese could safely challenge the dominance of the Japanese, likewise the Cubans against the Spanish, and the Japanese against the Americans. Apart from the US, Japan, Cuba and the Dominican, baseball has been largely a marginal sport and has not approached the global appeal of basketball. The US game has in recent years become quicker and achieved greater defensive finesse as a result of the presence of increasing numbers of Latin players.

Given that most of the essays seem to follow the same outline and end up reviewing many of the details common to baseball most everywhere, redundancy could have been avoided if the same material had been presented by one author. Still, this was an enjoyable and informative read and a suitable introduction to baseball as it has developed across the world.

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