The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball & Cricket, 1838-72 [Hardcover]

George B. Kirsch (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 8 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (January 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252015606
• ISBN-13: 978-0252015601
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,683,567 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Did Baseball Evolve from Cricket?, May 25, 2004

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Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Creation of American Team Sports: Baseball & Cricket, 1838-72 (Hardcover)

"The Creation of American Team Sports," a volume in the "Sport and Society" series of the University of Illinois Press, is an outstanding contribution to the emerging specialty of sports history. George B. Kirsch, professor of history at Manhattan College, offers a fascinating glimpse into the development of both baseball and cricket as important team sports in the mid-nineteenth century.

Kirsch describes baseball's movement from amateur to professional status after the Civil War, as well as providing an analysis of why the sport was so popular and how it eventually eclipsed cricket as a sport. In the process, he offers considerable insight into the nature of these two sports, who played them, the demographics of supporters, geographical strongholds such as Brooklyn (no wonder the Dodgers were one of the most beloved of professional baseball clubs and the most missed when they moved to Los Angeles), and the nature of clubs.

Kirsch concentrates on the well-organized amateur clubs, finding that they were more than groups of loosely-organized men who played the games. They were voluntary associations with organization and structure and dedicated to specific ideals. They held meetings beyond practices and games, and for many the club became the center of social life. They were dedicated to physical fitness and sold their sports to the greater society on that basis, but were also involved in other activities. Kirsch also documents that most of the members of the various clubs in the early era were at least in the middle classes with sufficient time and money to contribute to the sport. It was not until it was commercialized that baseball became the sport of the masses, and cricket never did so.

Baseball also cut across racial lines, there were black clubs, but these were also largely made up of members who were somewhat better off financially than average members of the race. The author also documents, and it is no surprise, that the cricket clubs had a much higher proportion of foreign born members, especially Englishmen, than did the baseball clubs. Indeed, Kirsch makes the argument that cricket's demise was tied to feelings of nationalism. Although he does not hold to the theory that cricket died out immediately after the Civil War, it was a decided backwater that did not have the enthusiasm surrounding it that baseball enjoyed. Cricket was popular among eastern elites until World War I when, Kirsch writes, "Country clubs adopted new British sports such as tennis and golf, which became more popular then cricket because of their greater appeal to participants and spectators" (p. 264).

One of the most interesting aspects of "The Creation of American Team Sports" the transition of baseball from an amateur, participatory sport to one that was professional and oriented toward spectators. The commercialization of baseball was caught up in the urbanization of America that took place in the Gilded Age. It was, perhaps, a logical outgrowth of the rising economic status of American workers, the increased amount of leisure time, and the rampant nationalism that celebrated the sport as the epitome of all that was virtuous in the nation. It was also a team sport, representative of the whole of the nation, with a decidedly individualistic aspect, in recognition of each person's uniqueness. Kirsch fully explains the many fits and starts of baseball's commercialization, highlighting difficulties with gambling, drunkenness, and other vices.

In all, Kirsch has produced a fine book that will be permanently useful to scholars, analyzing in one volume the personalities and core themes of the development of American baseball and its rivalry with cricket. An important addition to the scholarship of the American nineteenth century society, it will be a standard work for years.