Saturday, April 6, 2013

April 6-7, 2013: The Crowd-sourced World Series

[In honor of Opening Day, this week’s series has focused on some of the many AmericanStudies connections to the national pastime. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the hits provided by my fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours to help us bring it home, please!]
T.S. Flynn responds to Tuesday’s Black Sox post, writing, “As entertaining as they are, Asinof's and Sayles's Eight Men Out are flawed and fictionalized accounts of the Black Sox scandal. The baseball researcher Gene Carney worked extensively to unearth the facts behind the scandal, and he published his preliminary findings in Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball's Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. Unfortunately, Mr Carney passed away in 2009, but the work he began continues through SABR. Also of interest (particularly for American Studies scholars) is Saying It's So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal by Daniel A. Nathan, which examines the manifold ways the scandal has been represented (and twisted) in American popular culture.”
An anonymous commenter responds to the Ruth and Gehrig post, writing, “As a boy, I idolized Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as the greatest of all time, but in my adulthood I have to discount their accomplishments because they didn't play against African-American competition. Interestingly, they were willing to barnstorm against those players to make extra money in the offseason, but they didn't use their stardom to demand equality on the Major League stage. Perhaps it was simply a time before activist athletes like Ali, Bill Russell, and others, but a player like Ruth at the height of his powers was uniquely positioned to demand real change.”
Jeff Renye shares this amazing story of baseball in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What would you add?

No comments:

Post a Comment