Not Quite Ready for Prime Time : Baseball History , 1983 - 1993

When it comes to baseball, there is no denying Ecclesiastes: “Of the making of many books there is no end.” Whatever the place of the national pastime in the hearts and minds of America’s sports fans, baseball remains the sport of choice of the nation’s literati, continuing to attract more attention from creative writers, academics, and non-professional historians than any other sporting activity. In recent years, more than 350 books on baseball have been published annually, many of them works of “history.” Despite an abundance of baseball histories, the history of baseball remains remarkably obscure. The problem is not neglect, but just the opposite—a surfeit of certain kinds of histories that ignore major aspects of baseball’s history as well as baseball’s place in American history. This survey of baseball historical writing from 1983 to 1993 is limited to books. Journal articles and unpublished theses and dissertations have been excluded partly because of space considerations, but primarily because they are, for the most part, either incomplete studies or preliminary reports of work in progress. The term “history” is troublesome. In an age of interdisciplinary studies, one can no longer tell a book by its cover or its content by the author’s discipline. Considered, therefore, are books that are historical in approach and attempt to explain rather than simply document (e.g., chronologies and statistical compendia) baseball history. Although non-professionals continue to dominate the field, the focus is largely, but not exclusively, on the work of academic historians. Inclusion of books by non-professionals is limited to those works which are either primary contributions or particularly good examples of certain genre. The emphasis on academic writing reflects not only the principal audience of this journal, but also the belief that the future of baseball history turns on scholarly studies by trained historians augmenting the information-driven work of dedicated non-professionals. Finally, because the work of the last decade evidences no discernible topical, interpretive, or methodological patterns, the burden of the essay is an