Spalding's World Tour: The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made It America's Game

by Mark Lamster

In October of 1888, Albert Goodwill Spalding—baseball star, sporting-goods magnate, promotional genius, serial fabulist—departed Chicago on a trip that would take him and two baseball teams on a journey clear around the globe. Their mission, closely followed in the American and international press, had two (secret) goals: to fix the game in the American consciousness as the purest expression of the national spirit, and to seed markets for Spalding's products near and far. In the process, these first cultural ambassadors played before kings and queens, visited the Coliseumand the Eiffel Tower, and took pot shots with their baseballs at the great Sphinx in Egypt. This expedition to lands both exotic and familiar is chronicled with dash and wit in Mark Lamster's Spalding's World Tour , a book filled with larger-than-life characters often competing harder for love and money off the baseball diamond than for runs on it. Getting themselves into scrapes and narrowly escaping international incident all around the globe, these innocents abroad gave the world an early peek at the American century just around the corner. For anyone interested in the history of the game—or the history of brand marketing— Spalding's World Tour hits the sweet spot.

Genres: Baseball, History, Sports, Nonfiction

368 pages, Hardcover

First published April 3, 2006

About the author

Mark Lamster is the award-winning architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, and a Loeb Fellow of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He lives in Dallas.

Reviews

[MacK · Rating 3 out of 5]

I preface this with the following statement: I am a giganticly huge, massively epic, insultingly grandiose nerd when it comes to baseball.

Because of that I enjoy reading books about baseball to pass the time before baseball season begins again. And not just any books about baseball, books about baseball back when the men all had handlebar mustaches, and wore linen belts.

Spalding's World Tour brings back some of those men and some of that era with vivid detail. The journeys of 20 daring do-ers of baseball deeds are chronicled through a string of postcards, letters and personal journals.

While the tour was a flop (Spalding lost money, the sport has only recently become popular beyond US shores) the book is a moderate success. Lamster describes a few ports of call clearly and gives an impressive amount of description of the struggles the players faced.

However, he struggles to make the characters come alive beyond the recitation of box scores. The stars: Cap Anson, John Montgomery Ward, and William Spalding are easy to understand. Others, the lesser known infielders and catchers who packed their steamer trunks in amongst the rest are given shorter shrift and developed far less than their historically legendary counterparts.

Still, for the wandering baseball fan who's not always in the States during the season, it's nice to envision the great great grandaddies of the game playing in the shadow of the Arc De Triomph, the streets of Ceylon on the gardens of melbourne. And for any fan stuck between seasons, it's worth a glance.

[Kevin Payne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing extraordinary happens in this book but it is an interesting piece of odd history. Albert Spalding started as a star baseball player, first as a pitcher and then moved into the field did well there too. After he started his sports equipment business he thought a good way to promote baseball and demand for baseball gear was to tour across the United States and Australia/New Zealand with members of the Chicago White Sox, including Cap Anson (he owned the team) and a hand-picked team of All-Stars (most unknown today - he was unable to persuade Mike "King" Kelly of "Slide, Kelly, Slide" fame). On the way to Australia Spalding decided it would be a good idea to make it an around-the-world tour. They played exhibitions games and visited sites in India, Egypt (with the Sphinx as a backdrop for a game), Rome (an attempt was made to play in the Colosseum, unsurprisingly refused), England, and Ireland. To show their athleticism the ballplayers also played local opponents in cricket and rounders.
Enough amusing anecdotes and history of the game to interest baseball fans.

[ARoQ · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun piece of early baseball history that, as other reviews have noted, would probably have been best served as a shorter magazine article. Lamster’s writing is breezy and entertaining throughout, and he generally provides good context of the political and cultural climate of the baseball tour and its global stops. Unfortunately, the book can’t help but drag- and paragraph long descriptions of the innings in any given exhibition game played over 100 years don’t really help. Neither scholarly enough to be a must-have reference or engaging enough to be a great piece of historical writing, this is nevertheless a fun enough books for those interested in the early days of the National League and the efforts to codify baseball as The National Game.

[Timothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing is superb. The story is interesting, though simple enough. Ostensibly about early baseball and a grand adventure around the globe, it is really a travelogue with some amusing anecdotes in which the American pass time forms the background scenery. The real interest is how personalities and social norms of the time come to life. This is what makes the history of the sport in America so engaging - it is a delightful cross section of sociology, biography, politics, religion, business, and yes, sport and history. You don't have to be a fan to gain both enjoyment and "edification" from a book like this.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some things never change -- greedy baseball players, greedy owners, rowdy fans who want to drink beer on Sundays. Almost hard to believe this all happened more than a century ago.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

What it says. 1889. Interesting pictures and anecdotes.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty good story and history so far.Travel and promotion in 1880's.

[Mark Bunch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the story a lot. I enjoyed the writing style some. If you want to understand how Baseball became America's game this is the one to read.

[Vincent T. Ciaramella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book as a Christmas present and I loved it. I was especially interested in the game played on the Giza plateau. Why four stars and not five? I’m not sure I’d need to read this again. However, I will keep it as a reference.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worthwhile. Not deep, but fascinating.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inconsistent in both it's style and it's historical focus, I suspect this was originally a more scholarly work that was re-written with a magazine article style after the fact. Even with a bibliography it is often unclear what is original material from the author's own pen, and what he is quoting from prior sources. Not a significant issue for much of the breezy content, but confusing when the author would veer off into contextual issues of the day (especially late 19th century civic and national politics and the politics of baseball at large).

Also, the foreshadowing from early chapters often had zero payoff late in the book and I suspect he just ran out of steam. Theosophy, the further careers of John Ward and Ned Hanlon, the battles at the end of the 19th century to consolidate professional baseball, all of these were set up with background and context over a dozen chapters, and then got a four to five paragraph summary in the rushed epilogue.

I think if I was more knowledgeable about the minutia of early baseball history, and had already read one or two biographies of Albert Spalding and other business and baseball luminaries of the time, I wouldn't have felt like the context was rushed. Of course, if I was a historian of baseball, I would not have been able to suffer through the first hundred pages before the tour even got underway.

All that being said, it was a perfectly readable book once it got going. Neither a serious history or a fictionalization, it's essentially an extended populist magazine article about a quirky moment of Americana when one shrewed huckster magnate and his band of athlete ambassadors tried to conquer the sporting world with balls, bats, and America's "can do" spirit.

When I was eighty pages in, I would have struggled to give this two stars. At the 80% mark (not including the appendices and bibliography it's a mere 282 pages) I was very pleased and would have settled at four stars with a broad smile. Unfortunately, the close is anti-climactic and robs the work of what could have been a strong finish (which I suspect is largely true of the subject matter as well).

I will pick up other things by Mark Lamster, because I suspect he's a very good writer of pop-history. If you are a lover of early baseball (or just men with dashing handlebar mustaches) than this is a book worth your time. If you're looking for a biographical outline of Arthur Spalding, this might also satisfy that itch. If you want a comprehensive and deep history of baseball at the end of the 19th century, this will be frustratingly light on detail and breezy in it's approach.

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Told with an awkward sense of humor and an overflown sense of its subject's own significance, this history is marked by a breeziness that borders on silliness. The perfunctory information on the evolution of the game, the contrasting cultures of America and the rest of the world, and the development of the actual Spalding company is so sparse as to be useless. This would have been better as a magazine article, but even then, it would have been a mediocre one.

[Du · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. The story was interesting and the idea behind telling the story is good. Unfortunately, the book plods and doesn't tell the story efficiently or with enough interest. You read it, but you don't get sucked in. I think that the story was meant to be a long magazine article, and not necessarily a book. It was too much of a slog for the length. All that said, the photographs add a lot to the story and make the pace bearable.

[Emily]

sounds great - thanks for another great baseball book rec, Elizabeth

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't finish it.