The authors dig beneath the surface of the baseball mound and uncover an abundance of baseball lore to delight even the most confident of baseball savants. Includes 60 illustrations.

Baseball Americana is a lavishly illustrated history of America's favorite sport, compiled from the unparalleled collections of the Library of Congress, now available from Smithsonian Books. From baseball's biggest stars to street urchins, from its most newsworthy stories to sandlot and little League games, Baseball Americana tells the history of baseball's hardscrabble origins, rich cultural heritage, and uniquely American character.

The Bronx Is Burningmeets Chuck Klosterman in this wild pop-culture history of baseball's most colorful and controversial decade. The Major Leagues witnessed more dramatic stories and changes in the '70s than in any other era. The American popular culture and counterculture collided head-on with the national pastime, rocking the once-conservative sport to its very foundations. Outspoken players embraced free agency, openly advocated drug use, and even swapped wives. Controversial owners such as Charlie Finley, Bill Veeck, and Ted Turner introduced Astroturf, prime-time World Series, garish polyester uniforms, and outlandish promotions such as Disco Demolition Night. Hank Aaron and Lou Brock set new heights in power and speed while Reggie Jackson and Carlton Fisk emerged as October heroes and All-Star characters like Mark "The Bird" Fidrych became pop icons. For the millions of fans who grew up during this time, and especially those who cared just as much about Oscar Gamble's afro as they did about his average, this book serves up a delicious, Technicolor trip down memory lane.

Dan Epstein scored a cult hit withBig Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s. Now he returns with a riotous look at the most pivotal season of the decade. America, 1976: colorful, complex, and combustible. The season was defined by the outrageous antics of team owners Bill Veeck, Ted Turner, George Steinbrenner, and Charlie Finley, as well as by several memorable bench-clearing brawls, and a batting title race that became just as contentious as the presidential race. From Dorothy Hamill's "wedge" haircut to Kojak's chrome dome, American pop culture was never more giddily effervescent than in this year of Jimmy Carter, CB radios, AMC Pacers,The Bad News Bears,Rocky,Taxi Driver, the Ramones, KISS,Happy Days,Hotel California,and Frampton Comes Alive!---it all came alive in '76! Meanwhile, as the nation erupted in a red-white-and-blue explosion saluting its two- hundredth year of independence, Major League Baseball players waged a war for their own liberties by demanding free agency. From the road to the White House to the shorts-wearing White Sox, Stars and Strikes tracks the tumultuous year after which the sport---and the nation---would never be the same.

Rube Marquard (ne Richard LeMarquis) was the pitching star of the New York Giants in their pennant-winning years of 1911-1913. Blossom Seeley (nee Minnie Guyer) was a San Franciscan who had great success as a singer on the West Coast and went to New York City, where her first show, The Hen-Pecks, established her as a star. At the time, it was not uncommon for sports stars to play in vaudeville shows written especially for them, and so it was that the skit "Breaking the Record" was put together for Marquard and Seeley. Not only was it a great hit, but the two fell in love and Seeley divorced her husband of just a year to marry Marquard. In 1914, however, the Giants had a bad year, Marquard became less of a stage attraction and his wife went back on the vaudeville circuit as a solo act. They separated in 1916 and were divorced in 1922, as his career went downhill and hers soared so high that George Gershwin wrote "Somebody Loves Me" for her. The divorced couple corresponded for 50 years, until Seeley died in 1974. Hynd (The Giants of the Polo Grounds) has captured the spirit of the times in this quaint and entertaining sidelight to sports and show-biz history.

This encyclopedia looks at American society through the prism of its favorite pastime, discussing not only the game itself but a variety of topics with significance beyond the diamond. Its 269 entries, which vary in length from two hundred to twenty-five hundred words, explore the game's intersection with race, gender, art, drug abuse, entertainment, business, gambling, movies, and the shift from rural to urban society.   Filled with larger-than-life characters, baseball legends, sports facts and firsts, important milestones, and observations about daily life and popular culture, this encyclopedia is not only an excellent reference source but also an enjoyable book to browse.

From the vaudeville gyrations of New York Giants star pitchers Rube Marquard and Christy Mathewson, to Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as hoofing infielders in Take Me Out to the Ball Game, to the stage and screen versions of Damn Yankees, the connection between baseball and dance is an intimate, perhaps surprising one. Covering more than a century of dancing ballplayers and baseball-inspired dance, this entertaining study examines the connection in film and television, in theatrical productions and in choreography created for some of the greatest dancers and dance companies in the world.

For anyone who has ever sung "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh-inning stretch and wondered why we sing it when we are already at the ball game, this entertaining book supplies the answers. And why did this song become the sport's anthem rather than one of hundreds of other baseball songs, such as George M. Cohan's "Take Your Girl to the Ball Game," written the same month? This story, told here in full for the first time, evokes the bright hope of turn-of-the-century America, the backstage drama of vaudeville, and the beguiling charm of baseball itself. Amy Whorf McGuiggan supplies the fascinating details behind the song's beginnings in 1908, when Jack Norworth, a vaudeville headliner and Tin Pan Alley songwriter who had never even been to a game, was inspired by a subway advertisement to create the song that, though a hit in its day, did not become a time-honored tradition until broadcaster Harry Caray and team owner and marketing genius Bill Veeck Jr. reintroduced it during the 1970s. Here is America's game and the American century seen through the prism of one impossibly catchy tune and illustrated throughout with vintage photographs, advertising images, and sheet music culled from America's premier collections.

The authorized tie-in book to the 100th anniversary of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." With the release of this special edition book, the complete story of the song is presented, taking us on a fascinating journey into how "Ball Game" has come to take a unique place in our cultural landscape. The book includes images of historical newspaper clippings, baseball cards, sheet music, movie stills, ballplayers at the mic, and of course, Harry Caray leading the crowd at Wrigley. It also features an introduction by baseball commissioner Bud Selig and a foreword by Carly Simon.

Sports and popular music are synergistic agents in the construction of identity and community. They are often interconnected through common cross-marketing tactics and through influence on each other's performative strategies and stylistic content. Typically only studied as separate entities, popular music and sport cultures mutually 'play' off each other in exchanges of style, ideologies and forms. Posing unique challenges to notions of mind - body dualities, nationalism, class, gender, and racial codes and sexual orientation, Dr Ken McLeod illuminates the paradoxical and often conflicting relationships associated with these modes of leisure and entertainment and demonstrates that they are not culturally or ideologically distinct but are interconnected modes of contemporary social practice. Examples include how music is used to enhance sporting events, such as anthems, chants/cheers, and intermission entertainment, music that is used as an active part of the athletic event, and music that has been written about or that is associated with sports. There are also connections in the use of music in sports movies, television and video games and important, though critically under-acknowledged, similarities regarding spectatorship, practice and performance. Despite the scope of such confluences, the extraordinary impact of the interrelationship of music and sports on popular culture has remained little recognized. McLeod ties together several influential threads of popular culture and fills a significant void in our understanding of the construction and communication of identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This work focuses on the baseball movie genre in the years following World War II, beginning with the 1948 biopic The Babe Ruth Story and ending with the 1962 Mickey Mantle-Roger Maris vehicle Safe at Home!, when the consensus was that conflict should be limited in American society by emphasizing economic growth and a strong stand against Communism. Study of these thirteen films indicates, however, what this strategy was not entirely effective; American society was unable to prevent the rising storm of protest regarding race, gender and social and class issues which exploded in the 1960s.

This is a detailed look at the 111 fictional baseball films produced and released in the United States from 1915 through 2001. This expanded and updated version of the 1992 first edition covers 28 new films. New material includes an entry on 1978's Goodbye Franklin High (unavailable for the 1992 edition) and revisions to some entries after uncut versions of several silent and pre-1950 talkie baseball films were made available, among them Hit and Run (1924), The Battling Orioles (1924), Slide Kelly Slide (1927) and They Learned About Women (1930). Each entry contains full cast and production credits, year of release, production company, a synopsis, and a critique. Behind-the-scenes and background information is included. Two additional (and completely updated) sections cover baseball short subjects and baseball in non-baseball films. There is an extensive bibliography.