For anyone who appreciates history and black and white photography, “Baseball: An Illustrated History” by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns is a must-have for home libraries. The immediate inside cover is a double-spread, grainy image of an idyllic late 19th- or early 20th-century neighborhood scene of a baseball game, viewed from porches and grassy common areas. That photo is one of 530 illustrations comprising this hefty, 486-page volume.
Besides the photography that conveys the stories that show why baseball is deemed “America’s favorite pastime,” this book is packed with first-hand accounts, poetry, commentary, and more. In fact, American poet, essayist, and journalist Walt Whitman’s words (written in 1884) are the book’s epigraph: “Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms. ... The game of ball is glorious.” This quote is followed by 10 full-page, iconic photographs of everything from newsboy-capped youths determining which team bats first to a shot of Jackie Robinson determinedly sliding into a base.
Co-author Mr. Burns, who is considered by many to be our best documentary filmmaker and who produced and directed the documentary “Baseball,” on which the book is grounded, provides the book’s preface. He explains that the book is divided into “nine chronological chapters, or innings” and points out, “The game is a repository of age-old American verities, of standards against which we continually measure ourselves, and yet at the same time a mirror of the present moment in our modern culture—including all of our most contemporary failings.”
This book appeals to sports enthusiasts and history buffs alike due to its vast scope. It spotlights how baseball has impacted so much of American life for so long. For example, one whole page is devoted to the makeup of baseball’s two main accoutrements, the ball and the bat, which have changed little in almost 150 years of play. Other sections offer tidbits regarding how guarded prisoners at Union or Confederate camps played baseball during the Civil War, how the game influenced political cartoons, songs, and food, as well as how women’s baseball clubs were formed fairly soon after the sport’s origins.
The book notes that before mass media, people went to great lengths to publicize games, including riding cloth-sign-draped horses through towns and communities touting “Base Ball To Day.”
But it is the personal, Horatio Alger-type stories of talented boys rising from poverty to become admired superstars that dominate the bulk of the book. For better and for worse, the lives of Ty Cobb, Fred Merkle, Joe Jackson, Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Buck O’Neil, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, and many more are delved into in fascinating detail. Readers learn how the game may have defined their careers and even their lives post-baseball.
But it is the many photographs of children playing baseball in city streets, in rural fields, and on picket fence-lined sandlots that truly give readers pause to understand how an activity has touched a nation through the generations.
‘Baseball: An Illustrated History’
By Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns
A.A. Knopf, 1994
Hardcover: 486 pages
