The Presidents And The Pastime

The Presidents and the Pastime draws on Curt Smith's extensive background as a former White House presidential speechwriter to chronicle the historic relationship between baseball, the "most American" sport, and the U.S. presidency. Smith, who USA TODAY calls "America's voice of authority on baseball broadcasting," starts before America's birth, when would‑be presidents played baseball antecedents. He charts how baseball cemented its reputation as America's pastime in the nineteenth century, such presidents as Lincoln and Johnson playing town ball or giving employees time off to watch. Smith tracks every U.S. president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump, each chapter filled with anecdotes: Wilson buoyed by baseball after suffering disability; a heroic FDR saving baseball in World War II; Carter, taught the game by his mother, Lillian; Reagan, airing baseball on radio that he never saw--by "re-creation." George H. W. Bush, for whom Smith wrote, explains, "Baseball has everything." Smith, having interviewed a majority of presidents since Richard Nixon, shares personal stories on each. Throughout, The Presidents and the Pastime provides a riveting narrative of how America's leaders have treated baseball. From Taft as the first president to throw the "first pitch" on Opening Day in 1910 to Obama's "Go Sox!" scrawled in the guest register at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014, our presidents have deemed it the quintessentially American sport, enriching both their office and the nation.

This text explores tourism websites as mediums of identity construction and promotion. As interactive modes of communication, tourism websites for nations, cities, and attractions function critically in the new capitalism as calls for social action in contributing to economic and social rebirth, growth, and preservation.

Ah, baseball . . . the great American pastime, the reason so many people of all ages sit glued to their televisions or brave the traffic every weekend-because they love the game. For those who are captivated by the game season after season, year after year, Baseball Bitsis the quintessential little reference. Written and compiled by baseball expert Dan Schlossberg, this book is chock-full of the best trivia, information, and fun facts about the game. Featuring interviews with players, managers, and other baseball professionals, as well as never-before-told baseball stories, Baseball Bitsis sure to be a "hit" with just about anyone who's interested in the game. But that's not all, because beyond the stories and trivia, the die-hard fan also wants the most recent information that affects this season. What are the latest trades, and how will they affect his favourite teams? What are the best players' current stats, and will anyone be breaking any major records soon? That's where the second component of the book comes in-a companion website. Readers will find the essential information they seek on player stats and team developments on Dan Schlossberg's special website, offered just for readers of Baseball Bits. Inside each book is a password that lets readers log onto the site for up-to-the-minute information only available there. The site is guaranteed to be updated at least once a month-more frequently during the season-to provide readers with everything they need to know about the current season.

Funny, moving, and each one a diamond in the rough of the American consciousness, the essays in this book are the ultimate baseball conversation that pays homage to the perfect sport, in this perfect companion for all our personal baseball journeys. For some people baseball means a memory-of a certain dusty ball field on a certain summer day, or the first time they walked into a major league park and saw the perfect emerald playing field. For some, baseball means one heartbreaking or heroic moment. And for others, it means a father, a friend, or an old flame who shared a game for a day or for a lifetime. To create this marvelous book, more than 150 writers, athletes, celebrities, politicians, presidents, and pundits were asked what baseball means to them. The answers came back with richness, wonder, insight, and poetry. A fascinating portrait of baseball's beautiful nuances, What Baseball means to me marks the greatest collection of original essays ever written about the game. Accompanied by more than 200 classic baseball photographs, the voices in this book bring alive the game in all its venues-in the past and present, in wartime and hard times, in Cuba, in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium. We meet players in a different light: including Paul Molitor returning a baseball to a trusting boy named Dan Jansen, Derek Jeter as depicted by his dad, the Toledo Mud Hens as seen through the eyes of Christine Brennan, and Pedro Martinez talking about baseball as a way of life in his native Dominican Republic. Most of all, we meet ordinary Americans, like the kids Rudy Giuliani grew up with in Brooklyn, or the man in Philadelphia who transforms himself for every home game from mild-mannered Tom Burgoyne to the Phillie Phanatic.

Night games transformed the business of professional baseball, as the smaller, demographically narrower audiences able to attend daytime games gave way to larger, more diversified crowds of nighttime spectators. Many ball club owners were initially conflicted about artificial lighting and later actually resisted expanding the number of night games during the sport's struggle to balance ballpark attendance and television viewership in the 1950s. This first-ever comprehensive history of night baseball examines the factors, obstacles and trends that shaped this dramatic change in both the minor and major leagues between 1930 and 1990.

No sport has captured the personal and policital attention of America's Presidents like baseball. BASEBALL: The Presidents Game celebrates this longstanding and intimate relationship through a unique collection of photographs-many of which have never been published elsewhere-and a trove of baseball lore.

The Indiana State University Conference on Baseball in Literature and American Culture has consistently produced a strong body of scholarship since its inception in 1995. Eighteen essays presented at the 2004 and 2005 ISU conferences are published in this work. In “Baseball is a Place: Reflections On Building a Baseball Novel,” novelist Mick Cochrane discusses writing a baseball novel, using his 2002 novel Sport to exemplify the process. Tracy Collins, in “Women, American Society, and Baseball Literature in the High Cannon,” examines the ways in which canonical baseball novels are obliged to exclude women. In “‘A Grim Harvest’: Baseball’s Changing of the Guard, 1931,” Steve Gietschier shows baseball progressing from the tenuous agreements of the early modern era to become a stable urban business ready to take on the challenges of the mid-century. Joan Thomas’s “Baseball and America, a Timeless Love Story” muses on the ways in which fans’ relationship with baseball is like that of the lover to the beloved, irrational, forgiving, even maddening but always total. Fourteen other essays on the literature and culture of the game take on topics that include Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, August Wilson’s Fences, baseball’s long connection with presidents, its even longer connection with tobacco, and the virtue of cheering Chicago’s Cubs.