This entertaining history blends anecdote, incident, and analysis as it chronicles the story of our national pastime. Alexander covers the advent of the first professional baseball leagues, the game’s surge in the early twentieth century, the Golden Twenties and the Gray Thirties, the breaking of the color line in the late forties, and the game’s expansion to its current status as a premier team sport. He describes changing playing styles and outstanding teams and personalities but also demonstrates the many connections between baseball—as game, sport, and business—and the evolution of tastes, values, and institutions in the United States.
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“This coherent narrative history captures the glory, the excitement, and the occasional scandal that characterize the country’s favorite sport. Entertaining and informative without flogging readers with a plethora of numbing statistics, Alexander’s style should appeal to fans and students of baseball lore. A book that should readily lend itself as a tool in teaching modern American social and cultural history.” — School Library Journal
“This coherent narrative history captures the glory, the excitement, and the occasional scandal that characterize the country’s favorite sport. Entertaining and informative without flogging readers with a plethora of numbing statistics, Alexander’s style should appeal to fans and students of baseball lore. A book that should readily lend itself as a tool in teaching modern American social and cultural history.”
“Charles Alexander’s history of baseball is authoritative and a pleasure to read. I tremendously enjoyed it.”
“A commendable blend of people and events.”
" Wow, I read a lot of baseball books in the early 90's. This is a solid history where each decade is given it's own history. I remember the chapter on the rise of the american league was quite good. "
Charles C. Alexander, formerly a distinguished professor of history at Ohio University, is the author of a number of books, including Our Game: An American Baseball History and the celebrated biographies Ty Cobb and John McGraw.
Grover Gardner (a.k.a. Tom Parker) is an award-winning narrator with over a thousand titles to his credit. Named one of the “Best Voices of the Century” and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.
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