Customer Reviews

A History of Australian Baseball: Time and Game (Bison Original)

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The author, Mr Clark put close to a decades hard work into this historical account of Australian Baseball. He was upfront in the preface, introduction and acknowledgement page, noting that his book is the start of recording baseball history in Australia, and he encourages others to follow his lead. I disagree with Mr Bjarkman's comment that more focus was needed on individual players e.g. Craig Shipley. For the record Mr Bjarkman, Craig Shipley reached the US Major Leagues in 1986, NOT 1978, as you have stated above. The purpose of this book was to provide a historical account, and whilst individuals receive a mention, including Craig Shipley, the focus of this book is history and the development of the game in Australia. Also Mr Bjarkman makes the point that the author's reference to baseball first appearing in the Olympics in 1956 is incorrect. But I draw Mr Bjarkman's attention to the fact that Mr Clark does make reference to baseball first appearing in the Olympics in 1912, on page 87. The book was perhaps slim for a history, making it more like a short history, but in Mr Clark's defence there is a genuine finite supply of baseball records across Australia, and he made excellent use of the information which he obtained through solid effort and wonderful support from members of the baseball community. I would have liked a slightly more detailed timeline at the end of the book, which defined critical events, so that they could be referred to at a quick glance, i.e. for the benefit of refreshing ones memory with a condensed description of the event. Notwithstanding this, Mr Clark has set the foundation stones in documenting the history of baseball in Australia, and as he states, hopefully this will provide stimulus for more accounts.

Nicholas R.W. Henning, author of Australia's first baseball novel, The American Dream: From Perth to Sacramento and also Boomerang Baseball.

This first attempt at an academic history of Australian baseball provides a very mixed bag. There is indeed a wealth of useful information here on the origins of the game "down under" as well as on the 1888 Spalding Tour and the reciprocal Aussie "Disaster Tour of 1897" on US soil. But the emphasis throughout is heavily on the political spats and personal rivalries behind the sport's twentieth-century development from "winter time training for cricket" to Austrialian semi-national pastime. There is very little "on-field" baseball pictured here and it is clearly the front office moguls and meddlers and not the ballplayers who take center stage here. Every political spat along the way is related in painstaking detail, for example, while Australia's first modern-era major leaguer (Craig Shipley in 1978) is given little more than a single paragraph treatment. We learn little about what Claxton Shield Tournaments actually looked like over the years, other than finding out that most were plagued by horrible weather conditions and shoddy playing facilities before the eventual shift from winter-season to summer-season competitions.

What is most disheartening here, however, is the cavalier and largely inaccurate treatment of Australia's role in international competitions. A few examples suffice to cast doubt on the remainder of the book's accuracy. 1) A baseball exhibition between Australia and a USA service team at the Melbourne 1956 Olympics was not the debut of baseball in Olympic venues, as claimed in Chapter 5; similar demonstrations had already taken place at Stockholm (1912), Berlin (1936), and Helsinki (1952). 2) Australia did not become IBAF world champions by winning the 1999 Intercontinental Cup matches in Sydney; this tournament is NOT the IBAF world champion tournament as claimed here. That role is played by the alternate-year IBAF Amateur World Series (called the Baseball World Cup since 1988). And 3) Australia did not defeat FOURTH-place finisher Japan at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games; Japan was the SECOND-place finisher in that event. And in that tournament, Australia was not defeated several times by a "mercy rule" because they fell 6 runs behind. The international mercy rule involves a 10-run deficit, not six. These may be small enough details, but ones hard to understand in a volume that at other points appears to be so meticulously researched.

Peter C. Bjarkman, author of DIAMONDS AROUND THE GLOBE: THE ENCYCLOEPDIA OF INTERNATIONAL BASEBALL (2004)