The study of baseball history and culture reveals the national game as a contested field where debates about sport, character, work and play, the country and the city, labor, race, and a host of other issues, circulate. Understanding baseball, then, calls for careful consideration of several different perspectives and what each contributes to the conversation. Intended as a readable textbook for undergraduates (and perhaps advanced high school students) and their instructors, Understanding Baseball is designed to offer insights and inroads into baseball history as a rewarding academic subject worthy of careful scholarly attention. Each chapter introduces a specific disciplinary approach to baseball - in this edition, history, economics, media, law, and fiction - and covers representative questions scholars from that academic field might consider.

Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business within the broader contours of American history. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures—among them Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Hank Greenberg, Ford Frick, and several others—whose stories figure prominently in baseball’s past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness. Combining narrative and analysis, Gietschier tells the game’s history across more than three decades while simultaneously exploring its politics and economics, including, for example, how the game confronted and barely survived the United States’ entry into World War II; how owners controlled their labor supply—the players; and how the business of baseball interacted with the federal government. He reveals how baseball handled the return to peacetime and the defining postwar decade, including the integration of the game, the demise of the Negro Leagues, the emergence of television, and the first efforts to move franchises and expand into new markets. Gietschier considers much of the work done by biographers, scholars, and baseball researchers to inform a new and current history of baseball in one of its more important and transformational periods.