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Ambassadors in Pinstripes: The Spalding World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire
Author(s): Thomas W. Zeiler (Author)
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (UK)
- Publication Date: 22 Sept. 2006
- Language: English
- Print length: 232 pages
- ISBN-10: 0742551687
- ISBN-13: 9780742551688
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zeiler appears not to have missed a beat in his collection of relevant articles and books.
