Baseball Fever

This detailed history of early baseball in rural Michigan focuses on the evolution of America's pastime from child's game to organized sport and challenges the notion that baseball's development was strictly an East Coast phenomenon

When Jason gets sick, he must deal with the frustration of not being allowed to pitch in an important baseball game.

Tenyearold Ezra, who is suffering from an advanced case of baseball fever, must convince his scholarly father that this disorder is not responsible for wasting his mind away. Reprint.

Ten-year-old Ezra tries to convince his scholarly father that his baseball fever is not wasting his mind.

Generally acknowledged as the preeminent gathering of baseball scholars, the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture has made significant contributions to baseball research and pedagogy. This collection of 17 new essays is selected from the approximately 100 presentations of the 2013 and the 2014 symposia, covering topics whose importance extends beyond the ballpark. Presented in six themed parts, the essays consider the congruence of culture and baseball, the importance of ballpark itself, the myths, legends and icons of the baseball imagination, international and ethnic game variations, the work of baseball museum curators and a context for the game's rules of play and labor.

Baseball at its best is a combination of chess match and gladiatorial combat, waged over a long season but turning on split-second decisions and physical instincts. The 1916 season demonstrated the drama that made the sport the national pastime: tight pennant races, multiple contenders, record-breaking performances, and controversy, both on and off the field. Ten of the 16 teams battled for first place, four pitchers started and won both games of a doubleheader, Babe Ruth pitched on Opening Day, and players from the Federal League became the sport’s first free agents. The book features full rosters, player biographies, statistics, photographs and an appendix of the sportswriters who chronicled the season.

The definitive work on the language of baseball—one of the “Five Best Baseball Books” (Wall Street Journal). Hailed as “a staggering piece of scholarship” (Wall Street Journal) and “an indispensable guide to the language of baseball” (San Diego Union-Tribune), The Dickson Baseball Dictionary has become an invaluable resource for those who love the game. Drawing on dozens of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, as well as contemporary sources, Dickson’s brilliant, illuminating definitions trace the earliest appearances of terms both well known and obscure. This edition includes more than 10,000 terms with 18,000 individual entries, and more than 250 photos. This “impressively comprehensive” (The Nation) book will delight everyone from the youngest fan to the hard-core aficionado.