Research Guides: Baseball: History, Players, &amp; Coaching: History

Internet Resources

Archives and Collections: Baseball Hall of Fame
The Archives and Collections at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum preserve relics of the game, the great stories they tell, and a trove of historic information. The items within the Archives and Collections come in a variety of shapes and sizes – ranging from large three-dimensional artifacts to photographic slides and everything in between.
Baseball History, American History and You
This Game is closely tied to us in a very personal way, but what you may not realize is how much it is also tied to history. Often referred to as America's National Pastime, baseball has had a very active role in the shaping of this nation.
Who Invented Baseball?
A Civil War hero named Abner Doubleday is often credited with developing the game in 1839, but the real history is older—and more complicated.

Streaming Media

Baseball Grows by Hitting the Road
In the second half of the 19th century, advancing technology offered greater access to faraway places, which opened new avenues for baseball. From national to world tours, take a closer look at how baseball’s popularity continued to spread, and how men like Jimmy Ryan and Albert Goodwill Spalding helped set it all in motion.
Ground Rules: Baseball before Babe Ruth
The year 1920 is considered a pivotal year in baseball, when a sense of uniformity in the game was finally achieved. But what about the decades before? Travel back to the years before 1920 - a time when changes in the game were rapid, dramatic, and often surprising.
Reel Baseball: Baseball Films From The Silent Era
As featured in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, this collection offers a cornucopia of early --and, in many cases, extremely rare-- baseball films, offering privileged peeks into early twentieth century American lifestyles and values.
Baseball Grows through the Press
How did early newspaper editors cover baseball games and decide what, exactly, to write about? What makes Henry Chadwick such a monumental figure in early baseball writing? How did the introduction of the box score help baseball reporters with their jobs? How did post-game access to players change the nature of reporting?
Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns
Walt Whitman’s pronouncement that baseball “belongs as much to our institutions…as our Constitution’s laws” may not hold quite the same currency as it did in the poet’s day—but the sport has accompanied America through countless crises and upheavals and remains more than worthy of historical study. In this ten-part series, which includes the “Tenth Inning” added in 2010, director Ken Burns uses the dramatic lens he so deftly focused on the Civil War to examine (again, in Whitman’s words) “America’s game.” In doing so, Burns has created yet another timeless document that combines elements of history, sociology, mythic grandeur, and street-level poetry. An essential for high schools, academia, and public libraries. Distributed by PBS Distribution. 10-part series, 105-240 minutes each.

Perspectives

Baseball: An Illustrated History

The companion volume to Ken Burns's magnificent PBS television series--updated and expanded to coincide with the broadcast of a new, two-part Tenth Inning, directed with Lynn Novick. The authors of the acclaimed and best-selling The Civil War, Jazz, and The War turn to another uniquely American phenomenon: baseball. In words and pictures they provide a stunningly rich evocation of our beloved national pastime, a game woven inextricably into the fabric of our lives and our national memory. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns's moving and fascinating history of the game goes beyond stolen bases, double plays, and home runs to demonstrate how baseball has been influenced by, and has in turn influenced, American life: politics, race, labor, big business, advertising, social custom, literature, art, and morality. The book covers every milestone of the game: from the rules drawn up in 1845 by Alexander Cartwright to the American League's introduction of the designated hitter in 1973; from the founding of the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players in 1885 to the eight-month players' strike of 1994; from the 1924 Negro World Series (Kansas City Monarchs vs. Philadelphia Hilldales) to Jack Roosevelt Robinson's major-league debut in 1947; from the first curve ball in 1867 (pitched by Candy Cummings of the Brooklyn Excelsiors) to Nolan Ryan's seventh and last no-hitter in 1991. This new edition brings the authors' monumental work into the twenty-first century: steroids, home-run records, the rise of Latino players, the long-awaited Red Sox World Series victory, and so much more. Nine essays by notable baseball enthusiasts, exploring their individual preoccupations with the game, complement this sweeping narrative. And a wealth of pictures document baseball's evolution since the mid-nineteenth century and bring to life its most memorable figures. Monumental, affecting, informative, entertaining, and sumptuously illustrated--Baseball is a book that speaks to all Americans. With a narrative by Geoffrey C. Ward, a preface to the new edition by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, a new chapter by Kevin Baker, and an introduction by Roger Angell Essays by Thomas Boswell * Robert W. Creamer * Gerald Early * Doris Kearns Goodwin * Bill James * David Lamb * Daniel Okrent * John Thorn * George F. Will And featuring an interview with Buck O'Neil

But Didn't We Have Fun?

But Didn't We Have Fun? covers a period in the early days of baseball that even those who think they know everything about the popular American sport do not know. Peter Morris--an indefatigable researcher and brilliant chronicler, and winner of both the S

Past Time

Few writers know more about baseball's role in American life than Jules Tygiel. In Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, Tygiel penned a classic work, a landmark book that towers above most writing about the sport. Now he ranges across the last century and a half in anintriguing look at baseball as history, and history as reflected in baseball.In Past Time, Tygiel gives us a seat behind home plate, where we catch the ongoing interplay of baseball and American society. We begin in New York in the 1850s, where pre-Civil War nationalism shaped the emergence of a "national pastime." We witness the true birth of modern baseball withthe development of its elaborate statistics--the brainchild of English-born reformer, Henry Chadwick. Chadwick, Tygiel writes, created the sport's "historical essence" and even imparted a moral dimension to the game with his concepts of "errors" and "unearned" runs. Tygiel offers equally insightfullooks at the role of rags-to-riches player-owners in the formation of the upstart American League and he describes the complex struggle to establish African-American baseball in a segregated world. He also examines baseball during the Great Depression (when Branch Rickey and Larry MacPhail savedthe game by perfecting the farm system, night baseball, and radio broadcasts), the ironies of Bobby Thomson's immortal "shot heard 'round the world," the rapid relocation of franchises in the 1950s and 1960s, and the emergence of rotisserie leagues and fantasy camps in the 1980s.In Past Time, Jules Tygiel provides baseball history with a difference. Instead of a pitch-by-pitch account of great games, in this groundbreaking book, the field is American history and baseball itself is the star.

Playing for Keeps

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.

Early Innings

This compilation of 120 primary writings documents baseball's first century, from a loosely organized village social event to the arrival of the National League. Collecting from a wide range of sources--including newspaper accounts, letters, folk poetry, songs, and annual guides--Dean A. Sullivan of Fairfax, Virginia, progresses chronologically from the earliest known baseball reference (1825) to the creation of the Doubleday Myth (1908).

Middle Innings

Dean A. Sullivan presents a fascinating array of provocative, unexpected, and illuminating materials revealing the rich history of baseball. The 105 pieces in this work cover such topics as the Merkle Boner, Jim Thorpe, Christy Mathewson, thenbsp;Black Sox scandal, Lou Gehrig, the death of Ray Chapman, Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, and more from the storied major leagues. Lesser-known treasures celebrate semipro teams, boys' baseball fiction, Japanese baseball, college ball, black baseball, the minor leagues, women's teams, and other facets of the wonderful game of baseball.

Late Innings

Late Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1945-1972 is the third volume in Dean A. Sullivan's successful series on the vibrant history of baseball. Through 114 contemporary documents, Late Innings examines everything from Jackie Robinson's ground-breaking assault on the color barrier to Roger Maris's run on the home run record to the first stirrings of labor-management unrest in the 1970s. Late Innings also looks at exciting on-field activities, the antitrust controversy, issues of expansion, the effect of television on the game, and several other points of interest swirling around baseball in postwar America.

Final Innings

With Final Innings Dean Sullivan concludes his four-volume documentary history of baseball, whose three earlier volumes have been called "a broad array of illuminating and often unexpected materials" (Sports Collectors Digest), "an invaluable reference tool" (Newark Star-Ledger), and a "fascinating collection" (Washington Post), in which "ancient myths are shattered and new facts are uncovered" (USA Today Baseball Weekly). Culling the most pertinent, newsworthy, and just plain curious stories from newspapers and periodicals, and putting each into context, Sullivan constructs an informative and entertaining account of Major League baseball from 1972 through 2008. The 105 essays cover key topics such as George Steinbrenner's purchase of the Yankees, the first free-agent draft, the coming of lights to Wrigley Field, the cancellation of the World Series in 1994, and the BALCO steroid probe. They also bring to light lesser-known gems like the rise of sabermetrics and the federal injunction against team owners in 1995. Offering a you-are-there view of the events that made baseball into the game we know today, this book gives readers a chance to go back and experience baseball's recent history as it happened and was reported by many of the game's finest writers and most prominent voices.