Roberta Newman

Packaging Baseball: How Marketing Embellishes the Cultural Experience by Mathew J. Bartkowiak and Yuya Kiuchi (review)

When reviewing books of this nature, it is always quite easy to quibble over what is chosen for inclusion and what is excluded from the book. Certainly there is a case to be made for the inclusion of the cases Thornton examines. What is quite remarkable, however, is that neither Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League nor Toolson v. New York Yankees is treated in separate chapters. The Federal Baseball case is central to the understanding of the antitrust exemption and would seem to be a case that would be featured in a book titled Legal Decisions That Shaped Modern Baseball. The Toolson case might be of less importance, but it did move the antitrust issue forward. Both cases were cited in the Flood decision, and of course, Federal Baseball was the controlling case for the decision. Thornton does discuss these cases in the context of the Flood case, but a full treatment prior to dealing with the Flood case would seem to have been advisable. It is also somewhat surprising that Danny Gardella’s legal battle with baseball is not mentioned in connection with the antitrust issue. There are times in these chapters that the significance of the cases chosen is not clear. Greater attention to that issue would be helpful. Cases involving stadium injuries, the fight over Barry Bonds’s home run ball, and the batting championship of 1910 are interesting and entertaining reading, but their significance seems to be slight. In the end this is a book that should and will find an audience. The larger baseball public will find many of the cases quite interesting, as indeed they are. Many of the examinations of the judicial decisions are informative, enlightening, and explained clearly. Thornton compensates for the unevenness of the book with some strong chapters and sections, and ultimately Legal Decisions That Shaped Modern Baseball does advance our understanding of this important part of baseball history.

Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball (review)

ethnicity” (17). She does not understand that countless actors, both Jew and non-Jew, had their birth names altered by the Hollywood studios, all in the name of marketability. And so Roy Scherer became Rock Hudson, Lucille Le Sueur was renamed Joan Crawford, Bernard Zanville became Dane Clark. In the bibliography, Alpert cites the films mentioned in her text under the names of their directors. Yet Gentleman’s Agreement is listed under the film’s producer, Darryl Zanuck, rather than its director, Elia Kazan. Plus, the year cited is 1993. Gentleman’s Agreement was in fact released in 1947, as noted in the text. And while Alpert describes Gentleman’s Agreement as “a major Hollywood motion picture” that “depicted the range of anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviors that Jews experienced in America at the time” (32), she fails to acknowledge Crossfire, another major studio feature which decries anti-Semitism that was released months before Gentleman’s Agreement. Out of Left Field is instructive when recounting the stories of the Abe Sapersteins, Lester Rodneys, and the Belleville Grays. But it is exasperating, particularly when Alpert, an Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at Temple University, offers sweeping generalizations about the black and Jewish-American experience.

Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television (review)

Baseball and the Music of Charles Ives: A Proving Ground (Scarecrow, 2004), by Timothy Johnson, was similarly disappointing for one who loved baseball but had little formal education in music. Frankly, I was thinking along those lines. I was pleasantly surprised. It would be easy to go heavy on the “schmaltz,” to wax poetically about the social significance of the tune. Fortunately, the publishers decided to forgo the dry academic treatment in favor of the glossy route, allowing readers to wax nostalgic thanks to old album covers and sheet music reproductions.

Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game (review)

With Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game, Robert K. Fitts attempts to tell the story of baseball in Japan through the words of those intimately involved with the professional sport: players, managers, and one executive. Like Th e Glory of Th eir Times, a work to which it bears structural and stylistic similarities, Remembering Japanese Baseball is a collection of chronologically ordered, discrete recollections, with a foreword by Robert Whiting, himself the author of three excellent books on the Japanese game. Also included is a nice, concise history of yakyu, as baseball is called in Japan, and a separate timeline. While the primary focus of this text, as stated, is to paint a historic picture of the professional game in Japan since World War II, it also aims at pointing out basic diff erences between the way the game is played in Japan and America. Of the twenty-fi ve individual stories, only fi ve are the recollections of native-born Japanese players. Sixteen, in contrast, are the remembrances of gaijin or foreign players, all from the United States, with the exception of Orestes Destrade, a native Cuban. Four of the respondents are Nisei, or American-born Japanese. As such, Remembering Japanese Baseball is, more than anything, the story of outsiders playing in Japan, rather than of Japanese baseball, in general. It is no surprise, therefore, what this book does best is chronicle the diff erences. Fitts’s respondents point to a number of ways in which the Japanese game diverges from baseball as it is played in the United States. Th ey cite, for example, the Japanese insistence on playing for one run early in the game, as well as the absence of an established pitching rotation. What comes across most clearly, however, is not how the Japanese sport itself diff ers from American baseball, but rather, the ways in which Japanese and American baseball