(photo credit www.farm3.static.flickr.com)
Katie bought me a great Xmas present - Mark Lamster's "Spalding's World Tour: The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made It America's Game". I really enjoyed the book, as it took me step by step through the progress of the Tour at a time when world travel was still a novelty for the rich and baseball was as absurd to the countries visitited as the behaviour of the players.
Below is synopsis of the book, paraphasized, as reviewed by Adam Mazmanian of The Washington Post.
During the winter that followed the 1888 season, Chicago White Stockings owner and sporting goods magnate Albert Goodwill Spalding led a tour of professional baseball players around the world. His White Stockings battled the All-Americans, a team of standouts recruited from rival clubs, as they barnstormed from Chicago to San Francisco, then sailed for New Zealand and Australia, and went on to introduce the game to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Egypt, Italy, France, Britain and Ireland.
At the time, the tour was big news. The teams were bid farewell by President Grover Cleveland and welcomed back by his successor, Benjamin Harrison. While they traveled, the New York Sun featured almost daily dispatches on its front page. Upon their return, Mark Twain delivered a rollicking speech at a celebratory banquet.
In Spalding's World Tour, Mark Lamster, a devoted baseball historian and an editor at Princeton Architectural Press, attempts a door-to-door account of the expedition. Each of the tour's 57 games , if not the full box scores, at least the results are included. He draws on a host of journalistic accounts, published memoirs and diaries to convey the players' impressions of foreign lands, the shipboard banter, their misadventures at ports of call, as well as the logistical roadblocks to planning and promoting a round-the-world tour in the days before the Pacific cable.
Spalding -raised without a father from the age of 8 in the rural outskirts of Chicago, he broke onto the baseball scene as a 17-year-old phenom who pitched his scrubby Rockford, Ill., club to a deeply improbable victory over a nationally known team of barnstormers based in Washington, D.C. Spalding is a towering figure in the development of baseball. He was the game's first true impresario and the architect of its founding myth, that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839.
The rest of Spalding's crew was hardly less memorable. At shortstop for the All-Americans was the great John Montgomery Ward, a Columbia-trained lawyer who, owing to an ongoing labor dispute over baseball's notorious reserve clause binding players to teams indefinitely, was plotting his upstart Players League even as he traveled the globe on Spalding's dime. The Chicago captain was Adrian Anson, the league's premiere player -- variously nicknamed "Cap," "The Baby" and "The Chicago Fakir" -- and one of the early practitioners of the "hit and run" play, and an incorrigible arguer with umpires. Anson was also, in Lamster's words, "the most visible proponent of the movement to keep blacks out of organized baseball"; his refusal to play against a team fielding black star Moses Walker directly led to baseball's official ban on black players in 1887.
(photo credit Zmotive.com)
