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Baseball may be just a game on the field, but off the field, its hold on the American heart, its place in American history, and its impact on American society are as powerful as a squad of clean-up hitters. For a pastime, this is serious stuff demanding serious reflection, and historian John P. Rossi steps up to provide it. Approaching his subject with the rigorous gravitas of an academician, the number-love of a statistician, the awe of a fan, and the inalienable right of all ticket-holders to offer analysis when the impulse strikes, his result mirrors a typical afternoon at the yard: The National Game sprinkles its share of action, intriguing fact, and observations that merit more amplification over a predictable and familiar narrative.
He tries to cover the bases, and he does. His examination of baseball's transition from a country game to a city game, and with it the enormously symbiotic role it played in introducing--and synthesizing--each new wave of immigrants into American culture, is splendid. He makes the game's often Byzantine business practices--going back to the 1870s--at least understandable, and he takes some good cuts at the implications of the Black Sox scandal, the legacy of Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson's crossing of the color line, the tangled web of the reserve clause and free agency, the game's flight to the suburbs, and its return to downtown. For a concise introduction--"concise" and "introduction" must be stressed here--to baseball history, The National Game does its job; it's the literary equivalent of a solid utility infielder. Ironically, by trying to touch as many bases as he does, Rossi also spreads himself thin. That, in a nutshell, is the upside and downside of trying to compress a couple of centuries' worth of names, dates, events, trends, facts, fables, myths, and interpretation into just a couple of hundred pages. --Jeff Silverman
From Publishers Weekly
Rossi delivers a brisk, straightforward overview of baseball's evolution, following popular developments that have altered both the game and the business since the sport's inception as a popular hobby more than 150 years ago. He argues that baseball, more than any another sport and many national institutions, is intrinsically linked to American social change because its evolution has been shaped by so many of the issues that affected a modernizing America: labor relations, ethnicity, class, race, the economy, the power of the press and the significance of tradition. Rossi follows developments within the game and then suggests how these have helped or hurt it in the eyes of the fans, using both anecdotal information and broad statistical categories like attendance records and organization profits. Individuals are less important here than trends. Club owners, in all their varieties, show up throughout baseball history as active forces in this evolution, sometimes unknowingly, often unwillingly. Business decisions change tradition (the Brooklyn Dodgers move West) and even play (the American League adds the designated hitter to match National League attendance levels). Well-read fans of both baseball lore and American history may find that the overview approach results in significant gaps and generalizations, and there is little discussion of baseball's impact on American culture. Rossi, who teaches American history at La Salle University, is more interested in the story of baseball's style of evolution--how baseball reacted to the economic or social state of the nation, and how the game fared with fans in the wake of those reactions.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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