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.

The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 2009-2010 is an anthology of scholarly essays that utilize the national game to examine topics whose import extends beyond the ballpark and constitute a significant academic contribution to baseball literature. The essays represent sixteen of the leading presentations from the two most recent proceedings of the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, held, respectively, on June 3-5, 2009, and June 2-4, 2010. The anthology is divided into five parts: Baseball as Culture: Dance, Literature, National Character, and Myth; Constructing Baseball Heroes; Blacks in Baseball: From Segregation to Conflicted Integration; The Enterprise of Baseball: Economics and Entrepreneurs; and Genesis and Legacy of Baseball Scholarship, which features an essay written by the co-creator of baseball scholarship, Dorothy Seymour Mills.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year “An instant sports classic.” —New York Post * “Stellar.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A true masterwork…880 pages of sheer baseball bliss.” —BookPage (starred review) * “This is a remarkable achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A magnum opus from acclaimed baseball writer Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100 is an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write. The entire story of baseball rings through a countdown of the 100 greatest players in history, with a foreword by George Will. Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,? The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than two hundred years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?” Baseball’s legends come alive in these pages, which are not merely rankings but vibrant profiles of the game’s all-time greats. Posnanski dives into the biographies of iconic Hall of Famers, unfairly forgotten All-Stars, talents of today, and more. He doesn’t rely just on records and statistics—he lovingly retraces players’ origins, illuminates their characters, and places their accomplishments in the context of baseball’s past and present. Just how good a pitcher is Clayton Kershaw in the 21st-century game compared to Greg Maddux dueling with the juiced hitters of the nineties? How do the career and influence of Hank Aaron compare to Babe Ruth’s? Which player in the top ten most deserves to be resurrected from history? No compendium of baseball’s legendary geniuses could be complete without the players of the segregated Negro Leagues, men whose extraordinary careers were largely overlooked by sportswriters at the time and unjustly lost to history. Posnanski writes about the efforts of former Negro Leaguers to restore sidelined Black athletes to their due honor and draws upon the deep troves of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and extensive interviews with the likes of Buck O’Neil to illuminate the accomplishments of players such as pitchers Satchel Paige and Smokey Joe Williams; outfielders Oscar Charleston, Monte Irvin, and Cool Papa Bell; first baseman Buck Leonard; shortstop Pop Lloyd; catcher Josh Gibson; and many, many more. The Baseball 100 treats readers to the whole rich pageant of baseball history in a single volume. Engrossing, surprising, and heartfelt, it is a magisterial tribute to the game of baseball and the stars who have played it.

Focusing on the body in every chapter, this book examines the changing meanings and profound significance of the physical form among the Anglo-Saxons from 1880 to 1920. They formed an imaginary—but, in many ways, quite real—community that ruled much of the world. Among them, racism became more virulent. To probe the importance of the body, this book brings together for the first time the many areas in which the physical form was newly or more extensively featured, from photography through literature, frontier wars, violent sports, and the global circus. Sex, sexuality, concepts of gender including women’s possibilities in all areas of life, and the meanings of race and of civilization figured regularly in Anglo discussions. Black people challenged racism by presenting their own photos of respectable folk. As all this unfolded, Anglo men and women faced the problem of maintaining civilized control vs. the need to express uninhibited feeling. With these issues in mind, it is evident that the origins of today’s debates about race and gender lie in the late nineteenth century.

In 1926, Harvard athletic director Bill Bingham chose former Crimson All-American Arnold Horween as coach of the university’s moribund football team. The pair instilled a fresh culture, one based on merit rather than social status, and in the virtues of honor and courage over mere winning. Yet their success challenged entrenched ideas about who belonged at Harvard and, by extension, who deserved to lay claim to the American dream. Zev Eleff tells the story of two immigrants’ sons shaped by a vision of an America that rewarded any person of virtue. As a player, the Chicago-born Horween had led Harvard to its 1920 Rose Bowl victory. As a coach, he faced intractable opposition from powerful East Coast alumni because of his values and Midwestern, Jewish background. Eleff traces Bingham and Horween’s careers as student-athletes and their campaign to wrest control of the football program from alumni. He also looks at how Horween undermined stereotypes of Jewish masculinity and dealt with the resurgent antisemitism of the 1920s.

Presenting views from a variety of sport and history experts, Baseball in America and America in Baseball captures the breadth and unsuspected variety of our national fascination and identification with America's Game. Chapters cover such well-known figures as Ty Cobb and lesser-known topics like the "invisible" baseball played by Japanese Americans during the 1930s and 1940s. A study of baseball in rural California from the Gold Rush to the turn of the twentieth century provides an interesting glimpse at how the game evolved from its earliest beginnings to something most modern observers would find familiar. Chapters on the Negro League's Baltimore Black Sox, financial profits of major league teams from 1900 to 1956, and American aspirations to a baseball-led cultural hegemony during the first half of the twentieth century round out this superb collection of sport history scholarship. Baseball in America and America in Baseball belongs on the bookshelf of any avid student of the game and its history. It also provides interesting glimpses into the sociology of sport in America.

This reference work is an important resource in the growing field of heroism studies. It presents concepts, research, and events key to understanding heroism, heroic leadership, heroism development, heroism science, and their relevant applications to businesses, organizations, clinical psychology, human wellness, human growth potential, public health, social justice, social activism, and the humanities. The encyclopedia emphasizes five key realms of theory and application: Business and organization, focusing on management effectiveness, emotional intelligence, empowerment, ethics, transformational leadership, product branding, motivation, employee wellness, entrepreneurship, and whistleblowers; clinical-health psychology and public health, focusing on stress and trauma, maltreatment, emotional distress, bullying, psychopathy, depression, anxiety, family disfunction, chronic illness, and healthcare workers’ wellbeing; human growth and positive psychology, discussing altruism, authenticity, character strengths, compassion, elevation, emotional agility, eudaimonia, morality, empathy, flourishing, flow, self-efficacy, joy, kindness, prospection, moral development, courage, and resilience; social justice and activism, highlighting anti-racism, anti-bullying, civil disobedience, civil rights heroes, climate change, environmental heroes, enslavement heroes, human rights heroism, humanitarian heroes, inclusivity, LGBTQ+ heroism, #metoo movement heroism, racism, sustainability, and women’s suffrage heroes; and humanities, relating to the mythic hero’s journey, bliss, boon, crossing the threshold, epic heroes, fairy tales, fiction, language and rhetoric, narratives, mythology, hero monomyth, humanities and heroism, religious heroes, and tragic heroes.

2020 SABR Baseball Research Award In the mid-nineteenth century, two industries arrived on the American scene. One was strictly a business, yet it helped create, define, and disseminate American culture. The other was ostensibly just a game, yet it soon became emblematic of what it meant to be American, aiding in the creation of a national identity. Today, whenever the AT&T call to the bullpen is heard, fans enter Minute Maid Park, or vote for favorite All-Stars (brought to us by MasterCard), we are reminded that advertising has become inseparable from the MLB experience. Here's the Pitch examines this connection between baseball and advertising, as both constructors and reflectors of culture. Roberta J. Newman considers the simultaneous development of both industries from the birth of the partnership, paying particular attention to the ways in which advertising spread the gospel of baseball at the same time professional baseball helped develop a body of consumers ready for the messages of advertising. Newman considers the role of product endorsements in the creation of the culture of celebrity, and of celebrity baseball players in particular, as well as the ways in which new technologies have impacted the intersection of the two industries. From Ty Cobb to Babe Ruth in the 1920s and 1930s to Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Willie Mays in the postwar years, to Derek Jeter, Rafael Palmeiro, and David Ortiz in the twenty-first century, Newman looks at many of baseball's celebrated players and shows what qualities made them the perfect pitchmen for new products at key moments. Here's the Pitch tells the story of the development of American and an increasingly international culture through the marriage between Mad Men and The Boys of Summer that made for great copy, notable TV advertisements, and lively social media, and shows how baseball's relationship with advertising is stronger than ever.

Filled with insightful analysis and compelling arguments, this book considers the influence of sports on popular culture and spotlights the fascinating ways in which sports culture and American culture intersect. This collection blends historical and popular culture perspectives in its analysis of the development of sports and sports figures throughout American history. American History through American Sports: From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports is unique in that it focuses on how each sport has transformed and influenced society at large, demonstrating how sports and popular culture are intrinsically entwined and the ways they both reflect larger societal transformations. The essays in the book are wide-ranging, covering topics of interest for sports fans who enjoy the NFL and NASCAR as well as those who like tennis and watching the Olympics. Many topics feature information about specific sports icons and favorite heroes. Additionally, many of the topics' treatments prompt engagement by purposely challenging the reader to either agree or disagree with the author's analysis.

A fascinating and authoritative biography of perhaps the most controversial player in baseball history, Ty Cobb—“The best work ever written on this American sports legend: It’s a major reconsideration of a reputation unfairly maligned for decades” (The Boston Globe). Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player ever. His lifetime batting average is still the highest in history, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don’t tell half of Cobb’s tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: When the Hall of Fame began in 1936, he was the first player voted in. But Cobb was also one of the game’s most controversial characters. He got in a lot of fights, on and off the field, and was often accused of being overly aggressive. Even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce competitor, but he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961, however, his reputation morphed into that of a virulent racist who also hated children and women, and was in turn hated by his peers. How did this happen? Who is the real Ty Cobb? Setting the record straight, Charles Leerhsen pushed aside the myths, traveled to Georgia and Detroit, and re-traced Cobb’s journey from the shy son of a professor and state senator who was progressive on race for his time to America’s first true sports celebrity. The result is a “noble [and] convincing” (The New York Times Book Review) biography that is “groundbreaking, thorough, and compelling…The most complete, well-researched, and thorough treatment that has ever been written” (The Tampa Tribune).