Baseball and Cricket: The Creation of American Team Sports, 1838-72 (Sport and Society)

"Kirsch's account is highly engaging and quite edifying. . . . His analysis is keen,  his prose readable, and his thesis fascinating. . . . Kirsch rescues from dusty archives the names of the important cricket teams (or rather clubs), their lineups, their statistics, and wonderfully vivid accounts of critical cricket matches that help provide a contemporary American audience scantly familiar with the game a sense of its excitement, its attraction."--Aethlon

Product Description
How and why Americans picked baseball over its early rival, cricket, as the national pastime

George B. Kirsch takes us back to amateur playing fields around the country to re-create the excitement of the early matches, the players, clubs, and their fans. As a narrative history, Baseball and Cricket places the growing popularity of the two sports within the social context of mid-nineteenth-century American cities. The book's comparative analysis follows baseball's transition from a leisure sport to a commercialized, professional enterprise and offers the first complete discussion of the early American cricket clubs.

A volume in the series Sport and Society, edited by Benjamin G. Rader and Randy Roberts



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