SPALDING’S WORLD TOUR: The Epic Adventure That Took Baseball Around the Globe - and Made It America’s Game
by Mark Lamster
PublicAffairs, ₤15.99, 320 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤12.79
GROWING THE GAME: The Globalization of Major League Baseball
by Alan M. Klein
Yale University Press, ₤18.50, 304 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤14.80
It’s that time of year again: the American autumn air cools and clouds of tension build over baseball. Today marks the beginning of the World Series, .
But another kind of tension also rises every year. Now is the time when the World Series is typically mocked for its very unworldliness. The reflexive commentaries hold up the World Series as a recurring effigy of US culture and attitudes - a crystalline example of the US’s exceptionalism, its naive lack of interest beyond its own borders, and its arrogance. Baseball lacks the global spread of soccer, with a World Cup open to representative teams of all nations.
But baseball does in fact have a wide appeal internationally, for which it often gets too little credit: it is a pre-eminent sport in parts of east Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. And it continues to seek to grow. Two new books, Spalding’s World Tour and Growing the Game, look at the sport’s attempts to sell itself outside the US in very different eras.
Professional sport in the US has always been a branch of showbusiness. They evolved under P.T. Barnum-like entrepreneurs, barnstorming the country to attract fans. Mark Lamster’s entertaining book chronicles one of baseball’s earliest moguls, Albert G. Spalding, and his 1888-89 world trip to promote the sport by putting on exhibition games between his Chicago White Stockings and an all-star team. Baseball had taken shape on the US east coast by the mid-1880s, and gained national momentum as a result of the civil war and the spread of the railways. Spalding was in the initial wave of professional payers, and became one of the first sports stars to convert his prowess into a business empire, including a sporting goods company that still bears his name.
The tour played 57 games through the western US, Hawaii, Australia, Sri Lanka, Egypt (at the pyramids), Italy, France, England, Scotland, Ireland and back to the eastern states. The American west was still a frontier at this time, and the baseballers found Utah and California as exotic as a foreign country. Baseball in the late 19th century was a fast-paced, egalitarian, modern sport. Playing abroad accentuated this, so both the sport and its players appeared as ugly American tourists to Europeans - the very people baseball most wanted to impress.
Alan Klein’s Growing the Game reads unfortunately like a corporate consultant’s report on unsuccessful efforts to build baseball internationally. The sport spread furthest when the US hit the world stage more than a century ago; but its expansion appears to have stagnated decades ago.
Klein cites polls in which American football has become the most popular US sport, followed by basketball and then baseball. But baseball still pro-jects itself as the national sport, with an annual live attendance of 76 million - the largest of any major sport in the world.
When Spalding set out on tour, newly elected US president Benjamin Harrison called the country “an apart nation”. The World Series conjures that up every year. Lamster shines light on a recurring dilemma: sometimes American big ideas just do not translate, and the big country seems like a world of its own.
