From Publishers Weekly
Pro ballplayers playing exhibitions in the distant East, the sport beset by labor strife as management uses cutting-edge technologies to sell the game to an international audience. Sounds like last week, right? How about 1888? The common gripe runs that baseball is now too dominated by business priorities—but according to Zeiler, a history professor at the University of Colorado, things weren't any different 118 years ago. The first great evangelist of baseball, equipment manufacturer Albert Spalding sought to spread the largely eastern and midwestern pastime to every corner of the world, planning a westward winter tour of all-star teams, starting Down Under, then moving to Egypt, and ending with a Grand Tour of Europe. Zeiler's sober academic treatment includes discussions of labor strife, racial hierarchies and what might be called proto-globalism. Even if the subtitle overreaches, isolating the roots of internationalism for our "national" pastime isn't as absurd as it sounds: after all, at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the U.S.A. was outdone by Australia and Italy—both stops on Spalding's tour.
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Review
In 1888-89 two teams of professional baseball players squared off against one another on an international tour that included games in Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, and England. In this delightful book, Thomas Zeiler tells the story of this tour and puts it in the context of the imperial expansion of the United States that was so much a part of our diplomacy at the end of the 19th century. On the one hand, this is baseball history for adults. On the other, it is a painless -- even pleasurable -- way to introduce students to the global foreign policy that Americans would implement thereafter. (Bruce Kuklick )
Join “Big Al” Spalding and his Base Ball tourists on their globetrotting mission to make America’s pastime into the world’s game. You won’t regret the trip. Thomas Zeiler draws on the most recent scholarship on such subjects as globalization, gender, tourism, sports history, and race, to show how Spalding’s mission was America’s mission in all of its idealistic self-interested complexity. Highly informative and fun to read, Ambassadors in Pinstripes is an ideal book for courses on U.S. Foreign Relations, Sports History, and Gilded Age America. (Marc Gallicchio )
Pro ball players playing exhibitions in the distant East, the sport beset by labor strife as management uses cutting-edge technologies to sell the game to an international audience. Sounds like last week, right? How about 1888? The common gripe runs that baseball is now too dominated by business priorities—but according to Zeiler, things weren't any different 118 years ago. (
Publishers Weekly )
A thorough account of the then-unprecedented world baseball tour orchestrated by Albert Spalding (1888-89), relating to the heightened influence of the U.S. in international affairs. Recommended. (
Choice )
This is an interesting, well-conceived, ably contextualized, and accessibly written contribution to the literature of both US sport and cultural history....Zeiler is to be commended. (
The International History Review )
Ambassadors in Pinstripes captures the excitement and drama of Albert Spalding's audacious baseball tour of the world. Thomas Zeiler has woven a narrative that is part travelogue, part tour book, part baseball history, and, at the same time, an incisive critique of late nineteenth century imperialism. He offers the reader a real sense of both baseball and Americans abroad in the Victorian Era. (Jules Tygiel )
The book provides a very accessible, vivid, and fascinating . . . account of the 'greatest trip in the annals of sport,' the mysterious journeys of present-day baseball Marco Polos included. (
American Historical Review )
Zeiler appears not to have missed a beat in his collection of relevant articles and books. (
The Hawaiian Journal Of History )
