Scanning the Bookshelf

You might have guessed that the Library of Congress has the largest collection of baseball artifacts and memorabilia. But it's not as if you are simply going to stroll in and sift through these holdings, unless you have a serious reason for doing so.

Others, you may be pleased to know, have done the sifting for you — putting together one of the most seductively designed books about the sport to come our way, "Baseball Americana" (Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins, $29.99). Foremost, on the title page, is Harry Katz, a former head curator of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress. He conceived of the book and wrote it along with baseball historian Frank Ceresi. Assistance on assembling the myriad images that went into this book came from Phil Michel, the manager of the Library of Congress' archive of images at the Prints and Photographic Division. Wilson McBee and Susan Reyburn, editors in the library's publishing office, are also credited as collaborators.

Isn't some of the magic of baseball (still partially intact in spite of the steroid scandals) connected to its long history, mostly illustrious but peppered with scandals?

It will give you some sense of the depth of the collection to see that the earliest reference to the baseball is from the diary pages (reproduced here) of March 22, 1786, by John Rhea, a student at the College of New Jersey (now called Princeton). He wrote: "A fine day playing baste ball in the campus but am beaten for I miss both catching and striking the Ball." Modernize the language a little and it sounds pretty similar to what a player on the losing end of things still says in a post-game interview.

Interest in the sport had spread to the West Coast by the 1840s. San Francisco was the first center, where the Pacific Base Ball Club was founded in 1862. There is a photograph of its roster, in outfits that look formal by later standards, including heavy wool slacks and well-shined leather shoes.

The Bay Area continued to dominate, but by 1874, the authors say, there were San Diego teams. There were California League baseball cards, too.

The book contains many examples of early cards, which reminds you they weren't for kids in the beginning. Most promoted cigarette companies.

Photography and baseball carried on a love affair since the 1860s: Teams posed for portraits and photographs became the source material for the hand-drawn images on baseball cards.

By the early years of the 20th century, news services were already producing pictures of players like Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Honus Wagner and Boston Red Sox pitcher Cy Young in action poses.

A book like this, so rich and deep in material, is bound to introduce forgotten aspects of its subject. One neglected chapter in the history of the sport is the role of women. There were women's and coed teams all over the country, including at colleges. One photograph, of a Miss Myrtle Rowe, her bat raised, points out that she played first base for a semiprofessional team near Pittsburgh and "both her fielding and batting averages are said to rank toward the top of the semiprofessionals in this neighborhood."

There are fascinating views of long-destroyed ballparks like the Polo Grounds in New York and Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. Portraits of players abound, of the greats like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth and of players that some would rather forget, such as pitcher Eddie Cicotte, who was paid $10,000 to deliberately blow a game in the notorious 1919 series.

Major League Baseball takes up a large portion of the book, but "Baseball Americana," true to its title, looks at the sport in a broader way, too — to express how it permeated American popular culture. Expressions of that appear in such things as the cover of the song-sheet for "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" (1908), one of many such Tin Pan Alley songs, and lobby images for the movies, including "The Jackie Robinson Story" (1950) and "The Pride of St. Louis" (1951), about pitching great Dizzy Dean. There are magazine covers and Coca-Cola ads, photographs of government workers playing baseball on the National Mall and even, strangely, a baseball game pictured by Ansel Adams at the notorious Manzanar internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

This book brings baseball history to multifaceted life and reminds us that baseball is the sport that celebrates its history more than any other. Columnist and political analyst George Will, a longtime baseball enthusiast, writes in the book's foreword: "If you took someone from the age of President McKinley at the end of the nineteenth century and put him or her in a ballpark early in the twenty-first century, the time traveler would feel right at home." This book itself is a form of time-traveling — a pleasurable, often surprising and aesthetic trip.

To find out more about Robert Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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