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What can baseball teach us about language, culture, and society? The first book-length exploration of multilingualism in professional sports, Multilingual Baseball provides an intimate look at language diversity in the transnational world of baseball. Based on extensive interviews and observations in the US and the Dominican Republic, the book foregrounds the voices of current and former players, coaches, front office personnel, international scouts, language teachers, and interpreters, with baseball experience in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Engaging a wide range of foundational concepts within sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and linguistic and cultural anthropology, the analysis reveals the relevance of bilingualism to the social and economic realities of professional baseball as a transnational business. It also illuminates day-to-day encounters with linguistic and cultural difference on the field, in clubhouses, and in communities around the world. Through this linguistic lens, the book delves into social issues in diverse societies by connecting interactions within baseball to the broader challenges of immigration, race, and demographic change. While grounded in the experiences of Spanish and English speakers in US Major League Baseball organizations, Multilingual Baseball presents the transnational game as a microcosm of globalizing societies around the world, inviting readers to consider what we can learn from the bilingual understandings and misunderstandings that arise in everyday baseball interactions.

This title explores the ways baseball was established, how it evolved and expanded, and how baseball became part of the nation's identity. The text provides historical context and explores the social, economic, political, and technological frameworks that influenced or defined the popularity, growth, and modern advancements of baseball. Aligned to Common Core standards and correlated to state standards. Abdo & Daughters is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

A month-by-month history of an underappreciated season that will bring back memories for Chicago baseball fans—includes photos. Chicago Cubs fans always will remember the beloved 1969 team. Yet the 1970 Cubs are, in many ways, more interesting. The Cubs added fascinating characters like Joe Pepitone and Milt Pappas to the legendary nucleus of Billy Williams, Ron Santo, and Ernie Banks. The team came closer than in any year between 1945 and 1984—finishing only five games out of first place in one of baseball's hottest pennant races. Offering a fast-paced look at the season month by month, William S. Bike moves beyond wins, losses, and statistics to relive Ernie Banks's 500th home run, the addition of “the basket” to the outfield walls, and other iconic moments from a landmark year at Wrigley Field.

Baseball, first dubbed the “national pastime” in print in 1856, is the country's most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball's greatest charm—a clockless suspension of time—is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position—in reality and myth—in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War—when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps—to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online “fantasy baseball” to attending real games. Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather's bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball's history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.

Baseball Beyond Our Borders celebrates the globalization of the game while highlighting the different histories and cultures of the nations in which the sport is played. This collection of essays tells the story of America's national pastime as it has spread across the world and undergone instructive, entertaining, and sometimes quirky changes in the process. Covering nineteen countries and a U.S. territory, the contributors show how each country imported baseball, how baseball took hold and developed, how it is organized, played, and followed, and what local and regional traits tell us about the sport's place in each culture. But what lies in store as baseball's passport fills up with far-flung stamps? Will the international migration of players homogenize baseball? What role will the World Baseball Classic play? These are just a few of the questions the authors pose.

Ty Cobb called baseball a “red-blooded game for red-blooded men,” warning that “molly coddles had better stay out.” By this, Cobb meant that baseball was the ultimate expression of the masculine ideal – a game of aggression, rivalry, physical and mental dexterity, self-reliance, and primal honor. For over twenty years, Cobb expressed his fierce brand of manhood in ballparks throughout the American Northeast, gaining for himself a level of celebrity that was unsurpassed in the early twentieth century. Fans idolized Cobb not only because he was the best player in the game, but because his boisterous and combative style of play satisfied their desire for exhibitions of visceral manhood. They found in Cobb an antidote for what they feared were the corrupting influences of over-civilization.With balance, precision, and empathy, Steven Elliott Tripp brings the era to life in a narrative Publisher's Weekly has called “stunning.” In contrast to recent biographies of Cobb that have tried to minimize his more brutish behavior and minimize his racial antipathies, Tripp contextualizes Cobb, placing him squarely within the cultural milieu of both the rural South of his birth and the Northern sporting culture of his professional career. Moreover, Tripp's reconstruction of early twentieth-century sporting culture isolates an important source of modern America's culture of hyper-masculinity.Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood is both an important work of social and cultural history and an absorbing tale of ambition and the quest for dominance. Tripp has written the rare narrative that is as appealing to scholars as it is to general readers and sports enthusiasts.

Built on material that appeared in The Washington Post, this is a raw, inside look at the wear and tear and the glory and impermanence of baseball—shortlisted for the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.At 162 games, it is the sports world's longest season. Grueling. Thrilling. Routine. Lonely. Exhilarating. Major league ballplayers even have a name for this relentless, unmatchable rhythm: The Grind.In The Grind, Barry Svrluga, The Washington Post's national baseball correspondent, zooms in on the 2014 Washington Nationals, reporting not just on the roster's star players, but also on the typically invisible supporting cast who each have their own sacrifices to make and schedules to keep. There's The Wife, who acts as a full-time mom, part-time real estate agent, occasional father, and all-hours dog walker; The 26th Man, a minor leaguer on the cusp of job security who gets called up to the majors only to be sent back down the very next week; The Reliever, one of the most mentally taxing, precarious, and terribly exposed positions on any pro squad. These and many more players, scouts, equipment managers, and even travel schedulers create the fabric of Svrluga's intimate and unusual book; they could be from any team or any big-league city. As he writes: “There is no other sport with an everydayness, a drum-drum-drum beat like baseball.”

Walk through any major or minor league park today and the sights, sounds, and smells of baseball overwhelm. Teams long ago figured out that this immersive quality is a powerful draw, and the'fan experience'has been a major force in their marketing plans. In recent years, advancing technology has altered not only that experience, which now includes LED video boards and blasts of digital music, but the marketing and revenue opportunities for the game. Fans all over the world can subscribe to video and audio streams, acquire credit cards emblazoned with team logos, and follow their favorite players through league-sanctioned blogs. Baseball's ambition and reach are now truly global. Focusing on the game's dual identities as pastime and economic engine, the authors examine the ways that baseball is packaged, promoted and consumed in the United States and, increasingly, abroad.

Is the face of American baseball throughout the world that of goodwill ambassador or ugly American? Has baseball crafted its own image or instead been at the mercy of broader forces shaping our society and the globe? The Empire Strikes Out gives us the sweeping story of how baseball and America are intertwined in the export of “the American way.”From the Civil War to George W. Bush and the Iraq War, we see baseball's role in developing the American empire, first at home and then beyond our shores. And from Albert Spalding and baseball's first World Tour to Bud Selig and the World Baseball Classic, we witness the globalization of America's national pastime and baseball's role in spreading the American dream. Besides describing baseball's frequent and often surprising connections to America's presence around the world, Elias assesses the effects of this relationship both on our foreign policies and on the sport itself and asks whether baseball can play a positive role or rather only reinforce America's dominance around the globe. Like Franklin Foer in How Soccer Explains the World, Elias is driven by compelling stories, unusual events, and unique individuals. His seamless integration of original research and compelling analysis makes this a baseball book that's about more than just sports.