Author: Howard W. Rosenberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780972557436
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 559
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Book Description
Cap Anson was baseball's original superstar and, for well over a century, has remained the player who received the wittiest coverage, over a long playing and post career. On the heels of his landmark 2004 definitive biography of early baseball's biggest media sensation (and one other early superstar)--Hall of Famer Mike Kelly, whom legendary Boston Globe columnist (and J.G. Taylor Spink Award winner) Harold Kaese called "probably the most popular player in all of Boston baseball history"--Howard W. Rosenberg now focuses on the player called by H. H. Westlake of Baseball Magazine "probably the most independent character baseball ever knew." Rosenberg, who has demonstrated an unerring respect for the totality of baseball history, applies the same standard in his second full-length, definitive biography of a one-of-a-kind Hall of Famer. Also based on dozens of Cap's personal letters that have never been mentioned before, CAP ANSON 4: BIGGER THAN BABE RUTH: CAPTAIN ANSON OF CHICAGO traces Cap's life starting from childhood, when he grew up in a log cabin, through the one-of-a-kind gruff persona he took on as captain (player)-manager of the famous Chicago (National League) White Stockings (which later became the Colts) for a major league-record 19 straight years as an on-the-field leader with the same team. Then the book explores his fascinating post career that included his tenure as city clerk of Chicago, the city's number three post, 100 years ago (1905 to 1907); founding of a semi-pro team called Anson's Colts; his personal bankruptcy; and a long vaudeville career that is unmatched by any Hall of Fame player. Cap was the first big star in the game's history to age fully, healthily and colorfully in the public eye (to the reasonably ripe old age of three days before his 70th birthday). Except for aspects of him covered in the prior books in the series, the author explores the vast majority of all remaining aspects of the man and in relation to his key teammates, including one with great name recognition today: evangelist Billy Sunday. At a time when big-time publishers and mainstream media cherry-pick in "focus group"-like ways to appeal to names popularized by more modern technologies such as film and television, Cap Anson 4 brings back the glory days of print baseball journalism (even before Ring Lardner Sr.) and brilliantly illuminates its truly most legendary combination of hero and anti-hero: Cap is also the player most often blamed for bringing about the sport's color line that Jackie Robinson broke. For being the culprit, Cap was vilified in Ken Burns's 1994 PBS series on the sport. Accordingly, more than two dozen pages of Cap Anson 4 are devoted to claims and counterclaims about Anson's behavior and influence. Praise for Mike Kelly (Cap Anson 2): "Quirky and immensely readable, Mr. Rosenberg's book is a refreshing alternative to most that deal with Red Sox history and players. For one thing, there's not a single mention of the Yankees."-the New York Sun
Author: David L. Fleitz
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476612676
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
Cap Anson's plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame sums up his career with admirable simplicity: "The greatest hitter and greatest National League player-manager of the 19th century." Anson helped make baseball the national pastime. He hit over .300 in all but three of his major league seasons, and upon his retirement in 1897, he held the all-time records for games played, times at bat, hits, runs scored, doubles and runs batted in. For much of his career, he also served as manager of the National League's Chicago White Stockings (now known as the Cubs), winning five pennants and finishing in the top half of the league in 15 of his 19 seasons. Anson's career coincided with baseball's rise to prominence. As the sport's first superstar, he was one of the best known and most widely admired men in the United States. He took advantage of his fame, starring in a Broadway play and touring on the vaudeville circuit. He toured England, Europe, Egypt, and Australia, introducing baseball throughout the world. Regrettably, he also vehemently opposed the presence of African Americans in the game and played a significant role in its segregation in the 1880s. From Marshalltown, Iowa, to superstar status, this work traces the life and times of Anson and the growth of the national pastime.
Author: Howard W. Rosenberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 0972557415
Category : Baseball
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
This is the definitive biography of the Hall of Fame player who was the most likely model, if any single player was, for the title character in Ernest Thayer's 1888 poem "Casey at the Bat." A year earlier, Mike Kelly became famous when Chicago sold him to Boston for a then-record price of $10,000, about $200,000 today. Until the final year of his life, 1894, he drew exceptionally colorful and informative coverage.
Author: Sarah McCarroll
Publisher: Theatre Symposium
ISBN: 0817370145
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 123
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Book Description
A substantive exploration of bodies and embodiment in theatre Theatre is inescapably about bodies. By definition, theatre requires the live bodies of performers in the same space and at the same time as the live bodies of an audience. And, yet, it's hard to talk about bodies. We talk about characters; we talk about actors; we talk about costume and movement. But we often approach these as identities or processes layered onto bodies, rather than as inescapably entwined with them. Bodies on the theatrical stage hold the power of transformation. Theatre practitioners, scholars, and educators must think about what bodies go where onstage and what stories which bodies to tell. The essays in Theatre Symposium, Volume 27 explore a broad range of issues related to embodiment. The volume begins with Rhonda Blair's keynote essay, in which she provides an overview of the current cognitive science underpinning our understanding of what it means to be "embodied" and to talk about "embodiment." She also provides a set of goals and cautions for theatre artists engaging with the available science on embodiment, while issuing a call for the absolute necessity for that engagement, given the primacy of the body to the theatrical act. The following three essays provide examinations of historical bodies in performance. Timothy Pyles works to shift the common textual focus of Racinian scholarship to a more embodied understanding through his examination of the performances of the young female students of the Saint-Cyr academy in two of Racine's Biblical plays. Shifting forward in time by three centuries, Travis Stern's exploration of the auratic celebrity of baseball player Mike Kelly uncovers the ways in which bodies may retain the ghosts of their former selves long after physical ability and wealth are gone. Laurence D. Smith's investigation of actress Manda Björling's performances in Miss Julie provides a model for how cognitive science, in this case theories of cognitive blending, can be integrated with archival theatrical research and scholarship. From scholarship grounded in analysis of historical bodies and embodiment, the volume shifts to pedagogical concerns. Kaja Amado Dunn's essay on the ways in which careless selection of working texts can inflict embodied harm on students of color issues an imperative call for careful and intentional classroom practice in theatre training programs. Cohen Ambrose's theorization of pedagogical cognitive ecologies, in which subjects usually taught disparately (acting, theatre history, costume design, for example) could be approached collaboratively and through embodiment, speaks to ways in which this call might be answered. Tessa Carr's essay on "The Integration of Tuskegee High School" brings together ideas of historical bodies and embodiment in the academic theatrical context through an examination of the process of creating a documentary theatre production. The final piece in the volume, Bridget Sundin's exchange with the ghost of Marlene Dietrich, is an imaginative exploration of how it is possible to open the archive, to create new spaces for performance scholarship, via an interaction with the body.
Author: Don Doxsie
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476622922
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
In the world of sports, Iowa is probably best known for wrestling but the state has also produced more than 200 major league baseball players. Sixteen of them are profiled here, including six Hall of Famers, the game's brightest star of the 19th century, an American League batting champion, the only pitcher to lead the National League in strikeouts seven years in a row, the only catcher to catch two back-to-back no-hitters and one of the most dominant pitchers in American League history. They made their presence felt off the field, too. One helped fortify the game's racial barriers. One helped tear them down. One invented devices that changed the game. Two wrote instructional books on baseball. One became famous so young that he graced the cover of national magazines before graduating from high school. Each has a compelling story, some interwoven with the game's greatest moments.
Author: Mark Rucker
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439642184
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
The Chicago area today hosts two of the most historic major league franchises and half a dozen minor or independent league teams. Baseball's roots run deep in the Windy City. Indeed, it was Chicago businessman William "I'd rather be a lamp-post in Chicago than a millionaire in any other city" Hulbert, who, according to baseball lore, staged the coup that in 1876 would put the National League on the map. The Chicago White Stockings (now ironically called the Cubs) were one of eight charter members, winning the inaugural NL Championship with such legendary names as A.G. Spalding, "Cap" Anson, and Roscoe Barnes. But The National Pastime arrived in Chicago well before the 1876 season, as is proven in this fascinating new book, 19th Century Baseball in Chicago, illustrated with over 150 vintage images.Any local fan of the modern game-whether the action takes place at the "Friendly Confines," 35th & Shields, or the cozy setting of a minor league ballpark out in Kane or suburban Cook County-will enjoy the wealth of information offered in 19th Century Baseball in Chicago.
Author: John Thorn
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743294041
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
Think you know how the game of baseball began? Think again. Forget Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. Did baseball even have a father--or did it just evolve from other bat-and-ball games? John Thorn, baseball's preeminent historian, examines the creation story of the game and finds it all to be a gigantic lie. From its earliest days baseball was a vehicle for gambling, a proxy form of class warfare. Thorn traces the rise of the New York version of the game over other variations popular in Massachusetts and Philadelphia. He shows how the sport's increasing popularity in the early decades of the nineteenth century mirrored the migration of young men from farms and small towns to cities, especially New York. Full of heroes, scoundrels, and dupes, this book tells the story of nineteenth-century America, a land of opportunity and limitation, of glory and greed--all present in the wondrous alloy that is our nation and its pastime.--From publisher description.
Author: Peter Morris
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
ISBN: 1566639549
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 663
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Book Description
A fascinating and charming encyclopedic collection of baseball firsts, describing how the innovations in the game—in rules, equipment, styles of play, strategies, etc.—occurred and developed from its origins to the present day. The book relies heavily on quotations from contemporary sources.
Author: David W. Zang
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803299139
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Moses Fleetwood Walker was the first black American to play baseball in a major league. He achieved college baseball stardom at Oberlin College in the 1880s. Teammates as well as opponents harassed him; Cap Anson, the Chicago White Stockings star, is blamed for driving Walker and the few other blacks in the major leagues out of the game, but he could not have done so alone. A gifted athlete, inventor, civil rights activist, author, and entrepreneur, Walker lived precariously along America’s racial fault lines. He died in 1924, thwarted in ambition and talent and frustrated by both the American dream and the national pastime.
Author: David L. Fleitz
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786486848
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Almost from professional baseball's birth more than 130 years ago, the batting championship has been one of the sport's most highly coveted awards. Since 1949, the Louisville Slugger company has presented the man with the highest batting average at season's end with the Silver Bat Award, a regulation-sized metal bat plated in sterling silver with the winner's name and average engraved upon it. Throughout the years, heated battles for the Silver Bat Award have featured unusual machinations by players, managers, and entire teams, including allegations of cheating, bribery, deliberate misplays, and questionable strategies, and, in one especially bitter campaign, charges of racism. Here are the stories behind these races.
