Author: Justin Endres
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1365317188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 122
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Book Description
Base Ball in a River Town seeks to answer how our national pastime started in New Albany. Who were its founders? Who got the ball rolling across the New Albany fields? The answers to these questions open a window into the past-the lively and booming post-Civil War New Albany. From steamships to railroads, the first team experienced the end of one era and the start of another. The growth of baseball in New Albany also mirrors the rise of baseball across the country. From its infancy to national past time in no time. Learn about the first pitch thrown at the first official game on September 29, 1866, and join that unbroken line of young Southern Indiana men and women who have embraced our national past-time.
Author: Doug Nachbar
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The Best of River-Town Small-Ball captures the spirit, culture, and intensity of a special era of American life-The Golden Age of Baseball. Using both local "amateur" and professional baseball as both historical subject and literary vehicle, the book details aspects of the game and great local balllplayers whose excellence at the game made them at least local legends. Characteristics of the game and the time are clear: Baseball was life, and life was baseball. The boys were home from the war, full of hope and fire. Recovering economies began to roar. Character was stilll king. Boys of alll ages had an abundance of heroes. Country and communities were growing and optimistic. Jackie Robinson had broken MLB's racial barrier. Obscene salaries didn't separate the heroes in Boston and Brooklyn from those in Brownton and Belle Plaine. Baseball was the National Myth and the Local Buzz. Boys found a way to play ball every summer day. Town teams played "up" to bring the "best brand of baseball" possible to rabid fans. League competitions were ferocious dogfights. "God, baseball was fun back then," Arlington, MN, and Iron Range legend Jim Stoll exclaimed. "It was the golden age of everything," Minneapolis shortstop and advertising executive Jerry Stahl said of the era.
Author: Jones Howell
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0578081644
Category : Little League baseball
Languages : en
Pages : 165
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Book Description
"After his mother's mysterious death, young Jones escapes into Little League baseball and adventure in the small river town of Ramseur, North Carolina. He finds trouble enough when the smoking, stealing hoodlum Donnie Ratcliff and the simple-minded Buford Hicks move into the neighborhood and befriend him. Other quirky townspeople and their bizarre stories come alive when Hollywood decides to film a Depression-era movie the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, using the town, the river, and the defunct cotton mill as a backdrop. The invisible influence of his mother and the charm of the river, especially the mystique of an enormous bird he sights there, help Jones find meaning for his life beyond the heartbreak of loss and even beyond the confidence he gains as a baseball pitcher"--Page 4 of cover.
Author: Lucas Mann
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307907554
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
An unforgettable chronicle of a year of minor-league baseball in a small Iowa town that follows not only the travails of the players of the Clinton LumberKings but also the lives of their dedicated fans and of the town itself. Award-winning essayist Lucas Mann delivers a powerful debut in his telling of the story of the 2010 season of the Clinton LumberKings. Along the Mississippi River, in a Depression-era stadium, young prospects from all over the world compete for a chance to move up through the baseball ranks to the major leagues. Their coaches, some of whom have spent nearly half a century in the game, watch from the dugout. In the bleachers, local fans call out from the same seats they’ve occupied year after year. And in the distance, smoke rises from the largest remaining factory in a town that once had more millionaires per capita than any other in America. Mann turns his eye on the players, the coaches, the fans, the radio announcer, the town, and finally on himself, a young man raised on baseball, driven to know what still draws him to the stadium. His voice is as fresh and funny as it is poignant, illuminating both the small triumphs and the harsh realities of minor-league ball. Part sports story, part cultural exploration, part memoir, Class A is a moving and unique study of why we play, why we watch, and why we remember.
Author: George B. Kirsch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140084925X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167
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Book Description
During the Civil War, Americans from homefront to battlefront played baseball as never before. While soldiers slaughtered each other over the country's fate, players and fans struggled over the form of the national pastime. George Kirsch gives us a color commentary of the growth and transformation of baseball during the Civil War. He shows that the game was a vital part of the lives of many a soldier and civilian--and that baseball's popularity had everything to do with surging American nationalism. By 1860, baseball was poised to emerge as the American sport. Clubs in northeastern and a few southern cities played various forms of the game. Newspapers published statistics, and governing bodies set rules. But the Civil War years proved crucial in securing the game's place in the American heart. Soldiers with bats in their rucksacks spread baseball to training camps, war prisons, and even front lines. As nationalist fervor heightened, baseball became patriotic. Fans honored it with the title of national pastime. War metaphors were commonplace in sports reporting, and charity games were scheduled. Decades later, Union general Abner Doubleday would be credited (wrongly) with baseball's invention. The Civil War period also saw key developments in the sport itself, including the spread of the New York-style of play, the advent of revised pitching rules, and the growth of commercialism. Kirsch recounts vivid stories of great players and describes soldiers playing ball to relieve boredom. He introduces entrepreneurs who preached the gospel of baseball, boosted female attendance, and found new ways to make money. We witness bitterly contested championships that enthralled whole cities. We watch African Americans embracing baseball despite official exclusion. And we see legends spring from the pens of early sportswriters. Rich with anecdotes and surprising facts, this narrative of baseball's coming-of-age reveals the remarkable extent to which America's national pastime is bound up with the country's defining event.
Author: Dan Barry
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062079026
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
In “a worthy companion to . . . Boys of Summer,” a Pulitzer prize winning journalist “exploits the power of memory and nostalgia with literary grace” (New York Times). From award-winning New York Times columnist Dan Barry comes the beautifully recounted story of the longest game in baseball history—a tale celebrating not only the robust intensity of baseball, but the aspirational ideal epitomized by the hard-fighting players of the minor leagues. On April 18, 1981, a ball game sprang eternal. For eight hours, the night seemed to suspend a town and two teams between their collective pasts and futures, between their collective sorrows and joys—the shivering fans; their wives at home; the umpires; the batboys approaching manhood; the ejected manager, peering through a hole in the backstop; the sportswriters and broadcasters; and the players themselves—two destined for the Hall of Fame (Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs), the few to play only briefly or forgettably in the big leagues, and the many stuck in minor-league purgatory, duty bound and loyal forever to the game. With Bottom of the 33rd, Barry delivers a lyrical meditation on small-town lives, minor-league dreams, and the elements of time and community that conspired one fateful night to produce a baseball game seemingly without end. An unforgettable portrait of ambition and endurance, Bottom of the 33rd is the rare sports book that changes the way we perceive America’s pastime—and America’s past. “Destined to take its place among the classics of baseball literature.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Bottom of the 33rd is chaw-chewing, sunflower-spitting, pine tar proof that too much baseball is never enough.” —Jane Leavy, author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax
Author: John H. Ritter
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780399246647
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
In 1881, the scrappy, rough-and-tumble baseball team in a California mining town enlists the help of a quick-witted twelve-year-old orphan and the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid to win a big game against the National League Champion Chicago White Stockings. Prequel to: The boy who saved baseball.
Author: David Block
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803262553
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
It may be America?s game, but no one seems to know how or when baseball really started. Theories abound, myths proliferate, but reliable information has been in short supply?until now, when Baseball before We Knew It brings fresh new evidence of baseball?s origins into play. David Block looks into the early history of the game and of the 150-year-old debate about its beginnings. He tackles one stubborn misconception after another, debunking the enduring belief that baseball descended from the English game of rounders and revealing a surprising new explanation for the most notorious myth of all?the Abner Doubleday?Cooperstown story. ø Block?s book takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the centuries in search of clues to the evolution of our modern National Pastime. Among his startling discoveries is a set of long-forgotten baseball rules from the 1700s. Block evaluates the originality and historical significance of the Knickerbocker rules of 1845, revisits European studies on the ancestry of baseball which indicate that the game dates back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and assembles a detailed history of games and pastimes from the Middle Ages onward that contributed to baseball?s development. In its thoroughness and reach, and its extensive descriptive bibliography of early baseball sources, this book is a unique and invaluable resource?a comprehensive, reliable, and readable account of baseball before it was America?s game.
Author: Stew Thornley
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society
ISBN: 9780873515511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
From the early days of town ball to the latest seasons of the Twins and Saints, Stew Thornley offers the ultimate history of the Great American Pastime in the North Star State.
Author: William E. Akin
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786425709
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
West Virginia sprang into existence as a state in the midst of the Civil War, and "base ball," as it was called then, was close on the heels of statehood. A game in 1866 hosted by the Hunkidori Base Ball Club in Wheeling, is considered the first "match game of Base Ball." Some historians contend the game spread via the movement of soldiers who were from urban areas. The real roots of baseball are not the romantic image of rural boys in sandlots or lazy father-son afternoons. It was born and came of age as an urban sport, a social pursuit of well-heeled young men that in the early days often involved banquets and shows following each game. The author traces the history of minor league and independent league baseball in West Virginia. Baseball below the minor leagues has a rich and comparatively unexplored history, and West Virginia has made substantial contributions to this legacy. Chapters examine the chronological history of baseball and the larger economic and cultural changes that have influenced it. Eras include baseball as a social game (through 1873); the emergence of professional baseball (through 1895); its second boom (through 1905); the deadball era (through 1920); the Martinsburg dynasty (1914 to 1934); as a miners' sport (1920 to 1941); the Middle Atlantic League (1925-1942); the Mountain State League (1937-1942); the postwar years (1945-1955); the nadir (1955-1985); and "A Minor Miracle" (1985-2000), a chapter that heralds a comeback in the popularity of professional baseball.
