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The Modern Scholar: Take Me Out to the Ballgame: A History of Baseball in America
From the Publisher:
Baseball has been celebrated as "America's National Pastime" for more than 150 years, and recalls what seems to be a more innocent age - long summer afternoons and sandlot ball, fresh rural air, and brownstone stoops. This course, presented by Kenyon College professor Dr. Timothy B. Shutt, is a celebration of baseball's rich past and of a game stronger than ever.
Baseball has been celebrated as "America's National Pastime" for more than 150 years, and recalls what seems to be a more innocent age - long summer afternoons and sandlot ball, fresh rural air, and brownstone stoops. This course, presented by Kenyon College professor Dr. Timothy B. Shutt, is a celebration of baseball's rich past and of a game stronger than ever.
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First published August 14, 2008
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About the author
Timothy B. Shutt
22 books35 followersFor eighteen years Professor Timothy Baker Shutt has taught at Kenyon College in rural Gambier, Ohio, famed for its splendid teaching, for its literary tradition, and for its unwavering commitment to the liberal arts. No teacher at Kenyon has ever been more often honored, both by the college and by his students, for his exceptional skills in the classroom and as a lecturer. Professor Shutt’s courses in Kenyon’s interdisciplinary Integrated Program in Humane Studies and in the Department of English alike are always heavily oversubcribed, and he lectures on Homer, Plato, and Aristotle, the Bible and the Greek historians, Virgil and Dante every year to a packed house.
Shutt is a native of Ohio, raised in Michigan and schooled in Connecticut, where he was honored as an All-American swimmer during his high school years at the Hotchkiss School, and devoted much of his time to drama. He majored in English as undergraduate at Yale (’72). After three years at St. Mark’s School of Texas, where he taught English and History---and coached swimming---Shutt went on to graduate school in English, specializing in medieval literature and the history of ideas at the University of Virginia as a du Pont Fellow. After earning his Ph.D. in 1984, Shutt spent two further years at Virginia as Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, and took a position at Kenyon in 1986, where he has taught happily ever since, deeply enjoying his contacts with his students and the peaceful life of the Ohio countryside.
Shutt is a native of Ohio, raised in Michigan and schooled in Connecticut, where he was honored as an All-American swimmer during his high school years at the Hotchkiss School, and devoted much of his time to drama. He majored in English as undergraduate at Yale (’72). After three years at St. Mark’s School of Texas, where he taught English and History---and coached swimming---Shutt went on to graduate school in English, specializing in medieval literature and the history of ideas at the University of Virginia as a du Pont Fellow. After earning his Ph.D. in 1984, Shutt spent two further years at Virginia as Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, and took a position at Kenyon in 1986, where he has taught happily ever since, deeply enjoying his contacts with his students and the peaceful life of the Ohio countryside.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 12, 2017
If you're at all interested in baseball and it's history (both ancient and recent) then I think, like me, you'll find this both interesting and informative.
July 7, 2019
(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).
I loved baseball growing up but later pretty much lost interest in it. For me Mickey Mantle’s retirement was the day baseball died. Nevertheless this is an entertaining and educating course. I found the opening chapter the most interesting and here are some quotes from it:
“Baseball is unique in several respects—by no means least in its cultural impact on American life. …
Baseball is also unique in its susceptibility to careful statistical analysis … And baseball has long exerted a disproportionate attraction for intellectuals of one sort or another for just this reason.
But baseball is also unique, or nearly unique, on the field. Games, after all, come in families, and baseball belongs to a strange and a strong one. There is, of course, the race—thus track, horse-racing, auto-racing, swimming, sail- ing, and the like. There is the fight—boxing, wrestling, fencing, and the various martial arts. There are the various racket games—tennis, squash, ping- pong, and the rest. There is the athletic performance—gymnastics and diving. And then there is the game par excellence—we score goals and you try to stop us—manifested in sports whose name is legion, like soccer, basketball, football, rugby, hockey, field hockey, and lacrosse. And then there is the odd game of golf, weirder even than baseball, and more or less sui generis in its challenges and satisfactions. And at last we have baseball—and cricket and softball and various cousins
The fundamental action defining all the games of the family is hitting some moving thing, ordinarily a ball, with a stick … the game should be called “batball,” or, perhaps even better, “hitball.” But there is another complication that makes all the games of the family in some deep sense indirect, an inherent complexity that balances and enriches the atavistic appeal of swinging a bat. For hitting the ball, home runs perhaps aside, does not in itself constitute a score. Instead it enables the more or less circular run around the bases, on the part of the batter or previous batters, which constitutes a score. Linear movement—the pitched and hit ball— enables circular movement. Other games have nothing like this. And as the great Bill James observes—the most distinguished baseball theorist and commentator of them all—baseball and its relations are the only sports where the team with the ball is on defense. A very odd pastime in many respects. But a deeply appealing one all the same, for players and spectators alike.” (6-7)
“Where, then, does baseball come from? .. The true answer seem to be that, unsurprisingly, ‘batball’ goes back a long way. … The immediate ancestor of baseball as we know it, however, seems not to have been cricket, but the English game of “rounders,” played deep into colonial times in America and played in two variant forms. In New England, they played “Townball,” which featured four bases arranged as a square, not a diamond, with the pitcher in the middle and the batter, in effect, in the middle of the line between home and first. In New York, by contrast, they played “New York Ball,” or “Base Ball”—diamond arrangement, batter at home. And it is from the “New York game” that baseball directly descends.
So what was baseball like in its formative years? Well, as in contemporary sandlot ball, there was a variable number of players. Pitching was generally underhand—and slow. There were no gloves, so fielding was at a premium, and balls caught either on the first bounce or on the fly were out. Baserunners could put out by being hit with a thrown ball (this was called “soaking” or “plugging the runner”) or they could put out by being tagged out, as at present. And, generally, all batters on a side hit each inning. All of these features, differing as they do from contemporary ball, were eminently well- 8
adapted to players of relatively low skill levels, which were, of course, pre- dominantly those who then played the game at the time. (And it is, perhaps, worth observing that one reason that baseball and its cousins have declined in popularity as participant sports in recent years is their sheer difficulty. You have to do a lot of things passably well to be a ballplayer—throw, catch, run, and hit, at a minimum. The current youth-league choice of soccer is far less demanding at the novice level.)
As baseball developed, and as strong amateur teams and professional teams began to take the field, things didn’t change as much as you might suppose. The game looked very much, to cite Bill James once again, like contemporary fast-pitch softball. Pitching was underhand, though fast and crafty, and pitchers threw from forty-five feet. And they ordinarily pitched every game, even into the professional era. Again, though, there were no gloves. And balls were soft, and there were, as a general rule, no outfield fences. So there were lots of singles—and lots of errors.” (7-8)
“ In 1845 the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, led by Alexander Cartwright, who has as good a claim as any to be father of the game, took the field, among other places, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Knickerbockers were a gentle- man’s club, but relatively skilled for the time, and they played a game provid- ing, as at present, for three outs per team per inning. Their first “match game,” though, proved disappointing, as they took on an all-star, but ad hoc, “New York Base Ball Club” at their own home field in Hoboken and lost in four innings by the daunting score of 23–1.
By 1854, New York boasted four constituted gentleman’s teams—the Knickerbockers, the Gothams, the Eagles, and the Empires. And shortly thereafter the neighboring city of Brooklyn boasted an answering quartet—the Excelsiors, the Putnams, the Eckfords, and the Atlantics. Other clubs soon followed in their train …” (8)
“By the 1850s, put-outs by throwing at baserunners were abolished, and the 1860s saw the demise of the one-bounce flyout. This, of course, put an enhanced premium on fielding, and by 1875 players had devised both a catcher’s mask and the first, very primitive, fielding gloves. The game lasted nine innings and featured three outs per inning per team. But it still looked more like fast-pitch softball than it looked like baseball as we know it.” (9)
“ t was during the later nineteenth century that baseball became the game we now know, both in its organization and, more importantly, on the field. The most influential changes concerned pitching. In 1881 the “pitcher’s box” was moved from 45 to 50 feet, and three years later, in 1884, in what was probably the single most influential change of the time, overhand pitching was allowed. Up until 1887, implausibly enough, a batter could request either “high” or “low” pitches, but in that year
something very much like the modern strike zone was introduced. Walks, though, or bases on balls, were still fairly hard to come by. Over the course of the 1880s, in a complicated series of maneuvers, the number of balls required for a walk fell from nine, to eight, to seven, to five, and finally, in 1889, to four. In 1887 batters were first allowed to “take their base” after being hit by a pitched ball. And in that year, in what amounted to a one-year special, walks were counted as base hits, leading Tip O’Neill of the St. Louis Browns to the highest full-season average ever recorded, .482 by the then- current rules (and .435 in accordance with the rules previously and after- wards in place). Finally, in 1893, the “pitcher’s box” was abolished to be replaced by the current slab or “rubber,” a full 60 feet and 6 inches from the plate. And with that adjustment the modern game was essentially in place.
Foul tips were first counted as strikes as in 1895. And balls hit out of the park over fences closer than 210 feet (in 1888) and 235 feet (in 1892) became “ground-rule” doubles rather than home runs, a matter of some sig- nificance since Ed (or Ned) Williamson of the Chicago White Stockings had set the pre-Babe Ruth single-season home-run record in Chicago’s Lake Front Park, where the right-field foul pole stood a scant 196 feet away, and the left-field foul pole even closer, at 180 feet in 1884—about the distance of the center-field fence in a Little League park. Hence the right-handed Williamson’s mark of 27 homers that year was less impressive than might appear at first glance (he only managed 2 the year previous and 3 the year following when the White Stockings moved to a new venue). Finally, in 1884, woodworkers John Hillerich of Louisville made for Pete Browning, third base- man for the local club, the very first “Louisville Slugger.” (10-11)
“The 1880s had been a kind of baseball “golden age.” Big stars, like the celebrated, exuberant, and highly versatile King Kelly, had made $5,000 a year and more—$100,000 or more in today’s cur- rency. From 1883 to 1889 the League and the Association had even conducted a “world series” of sorts, not always conclusive and variable in length—the 1887 contest between the St. Louis Browns and the one-year wonder Detroit Wolverines had gone to 15 games—but generally profitable even so. This was the era of “mighty Casey” at the bat (the poem first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888, and was pro- claimed, so we learn, by vaudevillians for a generation and more afterward). … In 1884 Charles Gardner “Old Hoss” Radbourn pitched Providence to the world championship with a record of 60-12 over the course of nearly 700 innings, in what, according to Bill James, was the most valuable single-season performance of all-time.” (13-14)
Babe Ruth was “never defeated in his three World Series starts for Boston, compiling a cumulative earned run average of 0.87, while Boston, during his years on the team, won no less than three world titles. But it was with his bat that he spoke loudest. As a more or less full-time pitcher, playing some outfield in his off days, he had in 1918 tied for the league lead in home runs with 11. The next year, in 1919, he still took the mound for 15 starts, but spent even more time in the out- field, and galvanized the baseball world by hitting the truly staggering total of 29 home runs en route. Ed Williamson had hit 27 a generation before, almost all of them back in his short-fielded home park in Chicago. Ruth’s home runs, though, were something different, jaw-dropping, powering drives that looped like rockets, and at the time it was thought no one would ever hit so many again.” (27)
“No one did it better than Babe Ruth. Even taken out of context, his records are astonishing, and in the context of his time, they are even more so. He really was vastly better than his peers and really did, more or less single- handedly, change the game—not so much by trying to do so, as by doing what he did and being what he was. And he gained the appropriate reward. Babe Ruth has been dead for more than half a century now, and it has been more than seventy years since he played, but he is still, even now, far and away, without real competition, the most famous player of all time.” (30)
“in 1920 Ruth outhomered every other team in the league. (30)
I loved baseball growing up but later pretty much lost interest in it. For me Mickey Mantle’s retirement was the day baseball died. Nevertheless this is an entertaining and educating course. I found the opening chapter the most interesting and here are some quotes from it:
“Baseball is unique in several respects—by no means least in its cultural impact on American life. …
Baseball is also unique in its susceptibility to careful statistical analysis … And baseball has long exerted a disproportionate attraction for intellectuals of one sort or another for just this reason.
But baseball is also unique, or nearly unique, on the field. Games, after all, come in families, and baseball belongs to a strange and a strong one. There is, of course, the race—thus track, horse-racing, auto-racing, swimming, sail- ing, and the like. There is the fight—boxing, wrestling, fencing, and the various martial arts. There are the various racket games—tennis, squash, ping- pong, and the rest. There is the athletic performance—gymnastics and diving. And then there is the game par excellence—we score goals and you try to stop us—manifested in sports whose name is legion, like soccer, basketball, football, rugby, hockey, field hockey, and lacrosse. And then there is the odd game of golf, weirder even than baseball, and more or less sui generis in its challenges and satisfactions. And at last we have baseball—and cricket and softball and various cousins
The fundamental action defining all the games of the family is hitting some moving thing, ordinarily a ball, with a stick … the game should be called “batball,” or, perhaps even better, “hitball.” But there is another complication that makes all the games of the family in some deep sense indirect, an inherent complexity that balances and enriches the atavistic appeal of swinging a bat. For hitting the ball, home runs perhaps aside, does not in itself constitute a score. Instead it enables the more or less circular run around the bases, on the part of the batter or previous batters, which constitutes a score. Linear movement—the pitched and hit ball— enables circular movement. Other games have nothing like this. And as the great Bill James observes—the most distinguished baseball theorist and commentator of them all—baseball and its relations are the only sports where the team with the ball is on defense. A very odd pastime in many respects. But a deeply appealing one all the same, for players and spectators alike.” (6-7)
“Where, then, does baseball come from? .. The true answer seem to be that, unsurprisingly, ‘batball’ goes back a long way. … The immediate ancestor of baseball as we know it, however, seems not to have been cricket, but the English game of “rounders,” played deep into colonial times in America and played in two variant forms. In New England, they played “Townball,” which featured four bases arranged as a square, not a diamond, with the pitcher in the middle and the batter, in effect, in the middle of the line between home and first. In New York, by contrast, they played “New York Ball,” or “Base Ball”—diamond arrangement, batter at home. And it is from the “New York game” that baseball directly descends.
So what was baseball like in its formative years? Well, as in contemporary sandlot ball, there was a variable number of players. Pitching was generally underhand—and slow. There were no gloves, so fielding was at a premium, and balls caught either on the first bounce or on the fly were out. Baserunners could put out by being hit with a thrown ball (this was called “soaking” or “plugging the runner”) or they could put out by being tagged out, as at present. And, generally, all batters on a side hit each inning. All of these features, differing as they do from contemporary ball, were eminently well- 8
adapted to players of relatively low skill levels, which were, of course, pre- dominantly those who then played the game at the time. (And it is, perhaps, worth observing that one reason that baseball and its cousins have declined in popularity as participant sports in recent years is their sheer difficulty. You have to do a lot of things passably well to be a ballplayer—throw, catch, run, and hit, at a minimum. The current youth-league choice of soccer is far less demanding at the novice level.)
As baseball developed, and as strong amateur teams and professional teams began to take the field, things didn’t change as much as you might suppose. The game looked very much, to cite Bill James once again, like contemporary fast-pitch softball. Pitching was underhand, though fast and crafty, and pitchers threw from forty-five feet. And they ordinarily pitched every game, even into the professional era. Again, though, there were no gloves. And balls were soft, and there were, as a general rule, no outfield fences. So there were lots of singles—and lots of errors.” (7-8)
“ In 1845 the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, led by Alexander Cartwright, who has as good a claim as any to be father of the game, took the field, among other places, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Knickerbockers were a gentle- man’s club, but relatively skilled for the time, and they played a game provid- ing, as at present, for three outs per team per inning. Their first “match game,” though, proved disappointing, as they took on an all-star, but ad hoc, “New York Base Ball Club” at their own home field in Hoboken and lost in four innings by the daunting score of 23–1.
By 1854, New York boasted four constituted gentleman’s teams—the Knickerbockers, the Gothams, the Eagles, and the Empires. And shortly thereafter the neighboring city of Brooklyn boasted an answering quartet—the Excelsiors, the Putnams, the Eckfords, and the Atlantics. Other clubs soon followed in their train …” (8)
“By the 1850s, put-outs by throwing at baserunners were abolished, and the 1860s saw the demise of the one-bounce flyout. This, of course, put an enhanced premium on fielding, and by 1875 players had devised both a catcher’s mask and the first, very primitive, fielding gloves. The game lasted nine innings and featured three outs per inning per team. But it still looked more like fast-pitch softball than it looked like baseball as we know it.” (9)
“ t was during the later nineteenth century that baseball became the game we now know, both in its organization and, more importantly, on the field. The most influential changes concerned pitching. In 1881 the “pitcher’s box” was moved from 45 to 50 feet, and three years later, in 1884, in what was probably the single most influential change of the time, overhand pitching was allowed. Up until 1887, implausibly enough, a batter could request either “high” or “low” pitches, but in that year
something very much like the modern strike zone was introduced. Walks, though, or bases on balls, were still fairly hard to come by. Over the course of the 1880s, in a complicated series of maneuvers, the number of balls required for a walk fell from nine, to eight, to seven, to five, and finally, in 1889, to four. In 1887 batters were first allowed to “take their base” after being hit by a pitched ball. And in that year, in what amounted to a one-year special, walks were counted as base hits, leading Tip O’Neill of the St. Louis Browns to the highest full-season average ever recorded, .482 by the then- current rules (and .435 in accordance with the rules previously and after- wards in place). Finally, in 1893, the “pitcher’s box” was abolished to be replaced by the current slab or “rubber,” a full 60 feet and 6 inches from the plate. And with that adjustment the modern game was essentially in place.
Foul tips were first counted as strikes as in 1895. And balls hit out of the park over fences closer than 210 feet (in 1888) and 235 feet (in 1892) became “ground-rule” doubles rather than home runs, a matter of some sig- nificance since Ed (or Ned) Williamson of the Chicago White Stockings had set the pre-Babe Ruth single-season home-run record in Chicago’s Lake Front Park, where the right-field foul pole stood a scant 196 feet away, and the left-field foul pole even closer, at 180 feet in 1884—about the distance of the center-field fence in a Little League park. Hence the right-handed Williamson’s mark of 27 homers that year was less impressive than might appear at first glance (he only managed 2 the year previous and 3 the year following when the White Stockings moved to a new venue). Finally, in 1884, woodworkers John Hillerich of Louisville made for Pete Browning, third base- man for the local club, the very first “Louisville Slugger.” (10-11)
“The 1880s had been a kind of baseball “golden age.” Big stars, like the celebrated, exuberant, and highly versatile King Kelly, had made $5,000 a year and more—$100,000 or more in today’s cur- rency. From 1883 to 1889 the League and the Association had even conducted a “world series” of sorts, not always conclusive and variable in length—the 1887 contest between the St. Louis Browns and the one-year wonder Detroit Wolverines had gone to 15 games—but generally profitable even so. This was the era of “mighty Casey” at the bat (the poem first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888, and was pro- claimed, so we learn, by vaudevillians for a generation and more afterward). … In 1884 Charles Gardner “Old Hoss” Radbourn pitched Providence to the world championship with a record of 60-12 over the course of nearly 700 innings, in what, according to Bill James, was the most valuable single-season performance of all-time.” (13-14)
Babe Ruth was “never defeated in his three World Series starts for Boston, compiling a cumulative earned run average of 0.87, while Boston, during his years on the team, won no less than three world titles. But it was with his bat that he spoke loudest. As a more or less full-time pitcher, playing some outfield in his off days, he had in 1918 tied for the league lead in home runs with 11. The next year, in 1919, he still took the mound for 15 starts, but spent even more time in the out- field, and galvanized the baseball world by hitting the truly staggering total of 29 home runs en route. Ed Williamson had hit 27 a generation before, almost all of them back in his short-fielded home park in Chicago. Ruth’s home runs, though, were something different, jaw-dropping, powering drives that looped like rockets, and at the time it was thought no one would ever hit so many again.” (27)
“No one did it better than Babe Ruth. Even taken out of context, his records are astonishing, and in the context of his time, they are even more so. He really was vastly better than his peers and really did, more or less single- handedly, change the game—not so much by trying to do so, as by doing what he did and being what he was. And he gained the appropriate reward. Babe Ruth has been dead for more than half a century now, and it has been more than seventy years since he played, but he is still, even now, far and away, without real competition, the most famous player of all time.” (30)
“in 1920 Ruth outhomered every other team in the league. (30)
March 20, 2021
I very much enjoy the lectures of Timothy Shutt on literature as he has a knack of getting to the heart of a theme and putting the author and text into historical context.His enthusiasm is infectious. He is perhaps even more enthusiastic about baseball as a fan admitting that he plays simulated dice or computer games, describes the fantasy leagues that have membership in the millions etc.He does bring historical awareness to his treatment of baseball describing for example,how it became America's game in the 19th century and the impact of Jackie Robinson when the integration of baseball in 1947 was a real milestone in the slow progress of the United States towards racial equality. But his love of the game, and especially of power hitting, as opposed to small ball and the speed game severally affects his conclusions in the last two lectures where he extolls Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriquez and other steroid cheaters.He remarks on the explosion of home runs in the 90s ,compared to past eras ,without emphasizing that steroids artificially add strength and the wave of homeruns he loves so much flew on the wings of chemical additives. An earlier lecture spent time on the famous Black Sox scandal of 1919 but the steroid scandal of the 1990s was equally disfiguring though barely mentioned. None of the players like Bonds or Sosa he rates so highly are in the Hall of Fame because the world knows of their cheating.The only Hall of Fame these players will ever be in is a Hall of Fame for Liars.Shutt downplays this in his history and in my view this is a severe and surprising error in judgement.
June 4, 2019
While not on the level of Ken Burns' documentary, this was a fun and good history of the game. At first, I was questioning Prof. Shutt's seemingly naive tone when he glowingly praised the power hitters of the '90's such as Mark Mcgwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds. This production came out in 2008 originally, so he HAD to know about performance-enhancement drugs, right? Yes, he does. And the best and freshest part of the book is when he defends Barry Bonds in particular. As he explains, anabolic steroids will help you hit the ball farther, but it doesn't create the swing he had, and his ability to draw walks that created a better than .600 on base percentage. He's still one of the best offensive players in the game, and doesn't need an asterisk when you say that. I much appreciated his viewpoint.
November 21, 2021
While ultimately this mostly just becomes a recitation of player and team names over the past 150 years, there is some really interesting stuff. Most of all, though, the speaker/professor/author is incredibly engaging. Highly recommended.
July 7, 2025
Overall a good read on baseball. History on teams and players from the beginning up to Mark McGuire. I did the audio book and it sounded very much like a political radio show.
How did this book find me? It is about baseball and available until July 15 in the Audible+ catalog.
How did this book find me? It is about baseball and available until July 15 in the Audible+ catalog.
July 15, 2025
Take Me out To The Ballgame: A History of Baseball in America by Timothy Shutt is pretty good, but I will say that the first half is better than the second half, and the second half just sort of drops at the end in a way that feels way too abrupt.
January 7, 2022
Professor Shutt is always enjoyable to listen to. He knows the material and he presents it with both depth and entertainment. The course itself is a great survey of baseball history.
June 4, 2023
Omg, wtf did I just read
November 17, 2009
On a technology note, I actually got this book on a little mp3 player from the library and used a special cord to connect it to my car stero using the "Aux" slot. I don't think mp3 quality is as good as cd's so I don't think I'll get another mp3 book.
But about the book - it was really a lecture series on the history of baseball. There were too many names and dates for me to remember too much, but it was good to pick up a few tid bits since I decided last summer that I wanted to "get into baseball".
But about the book - it was really a lecture series on the history of baseball. There were too many names and dates for me to remember too much, but it was good to pick up a few tid bits since I decided last summer that I wanted to "get into baseball".
February 21, 2013
A pretty good audiobook. As big fan of baseball, it was nice to review my knowledge of baseball. Listened to the book for long walks and the flow was pretty good. The origin of baseball was correctly stated rather than the silliness about Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in 1839. The lecturer was fluid and addressed questions of comparison of decades, changes in baseball, dynasties, and the issue of performance enhancing book. An interesting audio book.
May 5, 2014
Tom Stechschulte introduces the speaker and topic. I love baseball and history! If Stechschulte had been the reader / lecturer of this Modern Scholar presentation, I would have listened, but I just could not stand listening to Professor Timothy B. Shutt. For whatever reason, his voice grated against me like fingernails on a blackboard. Ugh!
October 4, 2012
This book is great when discussing the philosophy of play in general or baseball in particular, specifics advancements in the game on the fields on which it is played and the specifics of individual players. Unfortunately baseball is very amenable to statistical analysis, and the statistics didn't interest me at all.
October 27, 2013
I have to say... This was pretty boring. I don't really know what it was, but I kept falling asleep. I had to re-listen to a bunch of the tracks because I couldn't focus. It was alright I guess. I just don't think I'd listen to it ever again. It's not like I don't like baseball. I find it fascinating... Just not this book. Really wanted to like it. =(
July 3, 2013
Good over view of baseball. The first few lectures from the origins up to 1920's really get into the history of the game. After that it becomes a decade by decade over view highlighting players from each decade.
July 16, 2016
I loved this from beginning to end. I honestly learned a lot. Thoroughly enjoyed it the whole way through. Highly recommend as an avid baseball fan!
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews