Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball

In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century. Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades. The 20th Anniversary Edition of Goldstein's classic includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s and an account of his experience as a scholarly consultant during the production of Ken Burns's Baseball.

Table of Contents:
Prologue Histories of the Game A Note on Method OriginsPart I: The Culture of Organized Baseball, 1857-1866 1. The Base Ball Fraternity Rites of Play "Hard Work and Victory" Players and Workers Cultural Antecedents2. Excitement and Self-control Dangerous Excitement Agents of Control: Rules, Umpires, and Women The Problem of Competition3. The "Manly Pastime" Men and Boys The Fly Rule Ethics of the Game: Reform vs. Custom Fruits of Reform: "Ambitious Rivalries and Selfish Victories"Part II: Amateurs into Professionals, 1866-1876 4. Growth, Division, and "Disorder" The Coming of the "Good Old Days" Growth and Fragmentation Cultural Conflict and Division5. "Revolving" and Professionalism The Decline of the National Association Baseball Capital and Baseball Labor6. The National Game Home and Away The Birth of the Cincinnati Red Stockings Uniform Identities Management, Triumph, and Defeat: The Red Stockings of 1869 and 18707. Amateurs in Rebellion The Amateurist Critique of Professional Baseball "Restoring" the Pastime8. Professional Leagues and the Baseball Workplace "Baseball Is Business Now" The Origins of Baseball Statistics The National LeagueEpilogue: Playing for KeepsNotes Selected Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Warren Goldstein is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Hartford. He is the author of William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: A Holy Impatience and coauthor (with Elliott Gorn) of A Brief History of American Sports.

Review :
A strikingly original interpretation of baseball's early history, Playing for Keeps is imaginatively conceived and rich in texture. It is not only commendable for its treatment of baseball history but appreciably expands our knowledge of nineteenth-century American urban life in general. (Journal of American History) Baseball remains our paradise lost, a perpetual disappointment, where the best hitters make outs two-thirds of the time and the home team seldom if ever makes it to October. One of the many virtues of Warren Goldstein's Playing for Keeps is that it explains why we continue to care, our hopes eternally and absurdly renewed each spring and dashed each autumn.... This is a marvelous book, tightly structured, entertaining, beautifully written; and, like the best social history, it focuses on the particular (the story of baseball) to enlarge our understanding of the general (American society and culture). (The Nation) Goldstein sees clearly that baseball's history is not only linear—that is, its events unfold chronologically—but also cyclical—that is, the same things tend to happen again and again. This repetition binds each generation of fans to the preceding ones and makes the emotional response to the game so intense. In the late 1850s, baseball was a club-based sport enjoyed by artisans, clerks, and shopkeepers who played for fun. Two decades later, it was a business run by owners and managers who employed players in an effort to make a profit. Goldstein analyzes the hows and whys of this transformation. (Sporting News) Rich in delicious information, Playing for Keeps argues that the first years of baseball established patterns of double thinking that still govern the complaints and yearnings of fans. Playing for Keeps tells its story with affection. Its calming long perspective should reassure lovers of the game—or business—as we approach new crises and apparent transformations. (New York Times Book Review)