Casey at the Bat (For Further Study)

For Further Study

• “Beginnings: Hooray for Captain Spalding!” A Baseball Century: The First 100 Years of the National League, edited by Sally Andrews, et. al., New York: Rutledge Books/MacMillian Publishing Co., 1978, pp. 23 – 40.

  This opening chapter of a commemorative picture book gives the early history of the game concisely and includes rare pictures of players, parks, paintings, etc.

• Heyleer, John, Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball, New York: Villard Books, 1994.

  The author, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, mentions the way that baseball developed in the 1800s, but his main focus in this book is the business of the game in recent decades.

• Honig, Donald, Baseball When The Grass Was Real, New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1975.

  This book contains interviews with major-league players who played from the 1920s to the 1940s. Many of the attitudes, the pride, and the exaggeration that are seen in the poem can be seen in their stories.

• Voigt, David Quentin, American Baseball: From Gentleman’s Sport to Commissioner System, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966.

  This well-researched and annotated book is mostly concerned with baseball’s evolution in the 1800s and gives an excellent description of the tensions between the venture capitalists who owned the teams and the players who were the country’s first generation of sports heroes.