Published: October 27, 2009 11:11 am      

BOOK REVIEW: A new look at the old ball game

Perhaps you think the last thing you or that baseball enthusiast in your life needs is another oversized love letter of a book full of photographs that traces the games’ ancestry back to sepia images of batters in beards and pitchers in pillbox hats.

You would be wrong.

Released in time for the World Series and for Christmas, “Baseball Americana: Treasures from the Library of Congress” offers several hundred pictures — photos, engravings, drawings, panoramic views of long-gone ballparks and an assortment of ephemera — the majority of which have never been published elsewhere. The imprimatur “Library of Congress” means the material comes from America’s largest trove of baseball artifacts (yes, bigger than Cooperstown’s), and little of it has ever been on any sort of display.

The book is thus a cultural history of America filtered through baseball, with an emphasis on the pervasive effect the sport has had on what might be termed the national spirit.

Wherever Americans went — westward, overseas, into cities and onto farms — baseball followed, and the book is full of evidence. All the prominent major leaguers are here, but so are a Chinese team in Honolulu, a team from the U.S.S. Maine (the ship sunk in the Spanish-American War), teams of women, Indians, prisoners, soldiers of both world wars playing the game on foreign soil, working men on company teams, ad infinitum until the reader is convinced the right to play the game is an amendment to the Constitution.

The book is a breathtaking addendum to everything you know about the sport. There are baseball cards, of course, including the earliest ones sold in cigarette packs, but also included is a print ad for Chesterfield featuring Jackie Robinson, dramatic photographs of circa-1900 cities with ballparks noticeably tucked into urban corners and the sheet music of the song “I Can’t Get to First Base with You,” composed by Mr. and Mrs. Lou Gehrig.

The book specializes in finding those obscure references to baseball in surprising spots of American culture. Page after page is a history lesson, not in baseball but in the importance of baseball. A 1910 photograph of bowler-hatted men sitting atop row houses overlooking Shibe Park in Philadelphia, the better to see the game for free, is followed by a brief essay on the sport in silent movies (the earliest-found reference was from 1898, when Thomas Edison took a camera to a Newark, N.J., ballpark).

Compiled by Harry Katz, a former Library of Congress curator, and several associates, the book gets to the heart of the matter the way Ken Burns’ 1994 TV documentary did. The chronological history is there, up to the modern era, but so is that eccentricity that comes from delving into a topic more deeply than the reference material already available.

The very idea that baseball inspired all these photographers, engravers, advertising directors, songwriters and artists is itself a revealing fact. People cared about the game, watched the game and, whenever possible, played the game. Those mustachioed San Francisco men identified as “The Pacifics” stare out in a formal portrait from 1866, and you can tell these guys are athletes. If you could crawl into the Wayback Machine and attend a game of theirs, you could even identify it as baseball.

If a coffee-table book of this nature impresses the reader, “Baseball Americana” will stun him or her, packed with material so familiar yet so unusual. With rarely-seen examples of the historical importance of the sport (including a photograph of a 1920 game in what looks like Buffalo’s First Ward), it might be the best example out there in the heavy-book-of-pictures genre, baseball division.

Ed Adamczyk is a freelance writer from Kenmore.



IF YOU READ

• WHAT: “Baseball Americana: Treasures from the Library of Congress”

• BY: Harry Katz

• DETAILS: Published by Smithsonian Books, 240 pages

• GRADE: A+