About this item
Baseball is much more than the national pastime. It has become an emblem of America itself. From its initial popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, the game has reflected national values and beliefs and promoted what it means to be an American. Stories abound that illustrate baseball's significance in eradicating racial barriers, bringing neighborhoods together, building civic pride, and creating on the field of play an instructive civics lesson for immigrants on the national character. In A People's History of Baseball, Mitchell Nathanson probes the less well-known but no less meaningful other side of baseball: episodes not involving equality, patriotism, heroism, and virtuous capitalism, but power--how it is obtained, and how it perpetuates itself.
About the Author
Mitch Nathanson is the author of the first and only comprehensive biography of the mysterious slugger Dick Allen. In GOD ALMIGHTY HISSELF: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen, he revealed in full the man behind the myth. In his latest baseball biography, BOUTON: The Life of a Baseball Original, Nathanson tells the remarkable story of Jim Bouton, the journeyman Yankee who found himself in Nowheresville, USA in 1969, otherwise known as the clubhouse of the expansion Seattle Pilots. Bouton found gold in the Upper Northwest, producing the greatest sports book of all time: BALL FOUR. BOUTON not only shows not only how he did it but digs deeper and explores the life of a man who won all of 62 games but who changed professional sports in ways 300-game winners never could. To which Bouton's Seattle Pilot teammate, Jim Gosger, would most likely say, "Yeah surrre."
