Creating The National Pastime; Baseball Transforms Itself 1903-1953

xiii, [1], 368, [2] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. G. Edward White joined the Virginia law faculty in 1972 after a clerkship with Chief Justice Earl Warren of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was appointed John B. Minor Professor of Law and History in 1987, and held that chair until 2003, when he became David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law. In 1992, he was appointed to a University Professorship, which he held until 2003. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and twice a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a fellow of the Society of American Historians, and a member of the American Law Institute. He received the Roger and Madeleine Traynor Faculty Achievement Award in 2008. White's 17 published books have won numerous honors and awards. These include the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, the James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law & Society Association, the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association, the Scribes Award and the Association of American Law Schools' Triennial Coif Award. White was editor of the Studies in Legal History series for the American Society for Legal History and the University of North Carolina Press from 1980-85. He served on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History from 1977-79, and on the Board of Editors of the Virginia Quarterly Review from 1980-2002. White's 1996 book, Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903-1953, reflects his life-long participation and interest in athletics. G. Edward White shows how seemingly irrational business decisions, inspired in part by the self-interest of the owners, transformed baseball into the national pastime. It started out as an urban sport. White describes its progression to an almost mythic status as an idyllic game, popular among people of all ages and classes. He then recounts the owner's efforts to preserve this image. According to White, nostalgic themes, guided owners toward practices that appear unfair to players and detrimental to the progress of the game. Reserve clauses, and limiting franchise territories were meant to keep a consistent roster of players on a team, build fan loyalty, and maintain the game's local flavor. Owners vigorously fought innovations, ranging from the night games and radio broadcasts to the inclusion of Negro players. White's story of baseball is intertwined with changes in business and with changing attitudes toward race. Derived from a Kirkus review: An astute examination of how baseball emerged as the national pastime by fostering a pastoral mythology that remained unchallenged until the early 1950s. White (Law and History/Univ. of Virginia; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1993) argues that ``baseball's past history was far more complex, and far less heroic, than romanticized treatments of the game might suggest.'' Hardly news, but as he so meticulously demonstrates, while baseball promoted its ``anachronistic dimensions'' as a rural, fresh-air sport played by apple-cheeked youths, it was able to do so, in part, by violating anti-trust laws, by implementing such unfair labor practices as the reserve clause, and by restricting its talent pool according to race. The struggle to maintain the myth began to fail in the postwar era. Owners followed the demographic shift westward, thus dashing nostalgic hometown ties for fans of teams like the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. At about the same time, the weakening of the reserve clause, the ``new labor relations atmosphere,'' and the integration of the game forced baseball to surrender the ``special qualities'' that had allowed it to appear untouched by time. The author's delineation of the business aspects of the game are a bit dry and too involved, but things liven up when he looks at the gambling and cheating that were a part of the game early in the.…