Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball
by Warren Goldstein, Warren Jay Goldstein
Category: Sports & Recreation

In the late 1850s, organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport. sport. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Goldstein reconstructs the culture and experience of early baseball through examination of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of player-manager Harry Wright. Emphasizing the game's simultaneous character as work and play, Goldstein explains the intensity of baseball's labor relations, as well as public ambivalence about the commercialization of the Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR