Baseball Rowdies Of The 19th Century

During the 19th century, baseball was a game with few rules, many rowdy players and just one umpire. Dirty tricks were simply part of a winning strategy--spiking, body-blocking, cutting bases short or hiding an extra ball to be used when needed were all OK. Deliberately failing to catch a fly in order to have the game called due to darkness was also acceptable. And drinking before a game was perhaps expected. Providing brief bios of dozens of players, managers, umpires and owners, this book chronicles some of the flamboyant, unruly and occasionally criminal behavior of baseball's early years.

During the 19th century, baseball was a game with few rules, many rowdy players and just one umpire. Dirty tricks were simply part of a winning strategy--spiking, body-blocking, cutting bases short or hiding an extra ball to be used when needed were all OK. Deliberately failing to catch a fly in order to have the game called due to darkness was also acceptable. And drinking before a game was perhaps expected. Providing brief bios of dozens of players, managers, umpires and owners, this book chronicles some of the flamboyant, unruly and occasionally criminal behavior of baseball's early years.

No other sport can begin to compare to the rich history and statistical record of baseball. It is part of what makes the game so alluring. In “Moments in Baseball History,” Mark R. Brewer examines twenty-two memorable games and the player at the center of that game. It should prove a feast for baseball fans.

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“A gentleman when the game was hard-bitten, played by rough-and-ready lads out to win whatever the cost....” Australia had few sporting heroes in the years preceding its federation in 1901. But before its 20th-century Olympic trailblazers, and Depression-era icons such as Phar Lap and Don Bradman, came an Australian sporting pioneer who was celebrated on the most glamorous stage in the world—American major league baseball. Joe Quinn’s story has long been lost in the land of his birth. This tale gallops from the deprivation of famine-ravaged Ireland through colonial Australia to the raucous ballfields of 19th-century America, with their unruly players and owners, brawls and adulation and backroom betrayals. Through 17 seasons in the major leagues, “Undertaker” Joe Quinn earned his place among the colorful characters who pioneered the modern game of baseball, as much for his ability to stand apart from their bad behavior as for his steadfastness on the field. Meet Australia’s first professional baseball player and manager, whose willingness to “have a go” in the grand Australian tradition will live long in the minds of sports fans on both sides of the Pacific.

Every pastime has a beginning. Chock full of facts and folklore, legerdemain and legends, ROWDIES depicts professional baseball in its infancy. It is the story of Connie "Yank" Griffin, and out-of-work laborer who becomes a professional base ball player to feed his young family, and team manager G.E. Devlin, universally considered "The Greatest Man Ever to Grace the Diamond." Together and with the rest of their Nine, they take us on a journey through one season of late nineteenth century professional baseball - a world where beer sold by the quarter is drank by the gallon, where cheating ballplayers will do anything to win - or lose, and where an aging legend can ride the back of a desperate kid towards a final shot at glory in the twilight of his storied career. Fans of historical fiction and lovers of baseball alike will delight in this tale of balls ... and strikes.

An informal and anecdotal history of the development of the role of the pitcher by a critically acclaimed student of baseball. William Curran traces the development of the pitcher, from his earliest days to his development as a dominant force. Iillustrations.

In the pre-Civil War and Civil War periods the Illinois black code deprived blacks of suffrage and court rights, and the Illinois Free Schools Act kept most black children out of public schooling. But, as McCaul documents, they did not sit idly by. They applied the concepts of “bargaining power” (rewarding, punishing, and dialectical) and the American ideal of “community” to participate in winning two major victories during this era. By the use of dialectical power, exerted mainly via John Jones’ tract, The Black Laws of Illinois, they helped secure the repeal of the state’s black code; by means of punishing power, mainly through boycotts and ‘‘invasions,’’ they exerted pressures that brought a cancellation of the Chicago public school policy of racial segregation. McCaul makes clear that the blacks’ struggle for school rights is but one of a number of such struggles waged by disadvantaged groups (women, senior citizens, ethnics, and immigrants). He postulates a “stage’’ pattern for the history of the black struggle—a pattern of efforts by federal and state courts to change laws and constitutions, followed by efforts to entice, force, or persuade local authorities to comply with the laws and constitutional articles and with the decrees of the courts.

From baseball in the arts to baseball in ads, from politics to pop culture, this book includes 80 rare illustrations that range from pages of the game's first known scorebook to the first baseball photo to the first newspaper box score, This is a mix of myth and fact, trivia and history, anecdotes and revelations, making it a must-have for every baseball lover's library.

This classic account tells the story of pro basketball's shaky beginnings and of how the game adapted to survive in its early decades.

The book that set the standard for sports textbooks has been extensively revised and updated for its new eighth edition. Among the many new topical additions are elite child athletics, gambling in college sports, performance enhancement drugs, sport and nationalism after 9/11, the Beijing Olympics, Nike and other corporations, the power of media in sport, and more on minorities and on disabilities in sport.

"Baseball is not a Summer snap, but a business.... A player is not a sporting man. He is hired to do certain work and do it as well as he possibly can." John Montgomery Ward, nineteenth-century America's most-talked-about (both reviled and applauded) baseball player, spoke these words shortly after the failure of the great player rebellion of 1890, a revolution Ward almost singlehandedly fomented. That year, four out of every five National Leaguers, taking great economic risk, deserted professional baseball's establishment to create an "outlaw" rival organization: The Players' League. Team owners, the players felt, treated them like chattel: they "dished saltpeter in their sidemeat and gave them shameful financial beatings if they misbehaved," writes Bryan Di Salvatore in this fascinating, rigorous, and brisk biography. A Clever Base-Ballist is also a keenly observant narrative of late nineteenth-century America. In it can be found the likes of Mark Twain, Hawaii's King Kalakuau, and Moses Fleetwood Walker, the major league's first black player. It travels from the groaning boards of Delmonico's restaurant to the boisterous pages of the 1880s entertainment press to the Egyptian desert, where the target of one thrown baseball was the Sphinx's right eye. Handsome, erudite, and brilliantly talented, Ward made front-page headlines across the country when he married New York actress Helen Dauvray. And when they weren't branding him a terrorist, owners trumpeted the college-educated Ward as the sport's premier role model. An unblinking antidote to "good-old-days" syndrome, A Clever Base-Ballist is an accessible, compelling, and unconventional biography of anunconventional and, until now, obscure American.