Spalding's World Tour: The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made It America's Game - Hardcover

Lamster, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586483110 ISBN 13: 9781586483111

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2006

Synopsis

In October of 1888, Albert Goodwill Spalding—baseball star, sporting-goods magnate, promotional genius, serial fabulist—departed Chicago on a trip that would take him and two baseball teams on a journey clear around the globe. Their mission, closely followed in the American and international press, had two (secret) goals: to fix the game in the American consciousness as the purest expression of the national spirit, and to seed markets for Spalding's products near and far. In the process, these first cultural ambassadors played before kings and queens, visited the Coliseumand the Eiffel Tower, and took pot shots with their baseballs at the great Sphinx in Egypt. This expedition to lands both exotic and familiar is chronicled with dash and wit in Mark Lamster's Spalding's World Tour, a book filled with larger-than-life characters often competing harder for love and money off the baseball diamond than for runs on it. Getting themselves into scrapes and narrowly escaping international incident all around the globe, these innocents abroad gave the world an early peek at the American century just around the corner. For anyone interested in the history of the game—or the history of brand marketing—Spalding's World Tour hits the sweet spot.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Lamster is senior acquisitions editor at Princeton Architectural Press in New York. His writing on baseball, history, design, and architecture has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, Metropolis, I.D., and Architecture. Lamster lives in New York City and is an active member of the Society of American Baseball Research.

From The Washington Post:

During the winter that followed the 1888 season, Chicago White Stockings owner and sporting goods magnate Albert Goodwill Spalding led a tour of professional baseball players around the world. His White Stockings battled the All-Americans, a team of standouts recruited from rival clubs, as they barnstormed from Chicago to San Francisco, then sailed for New Zealand and Australia, and went on to introduce the game to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Egypt, Italy, France, Britain and Ireland.

Judging by the recently completed 2006 World Baseball Classic, the expedition failed to achieve any lasting impact. Only two of the nations Spalding visited fielded teams, winning between them just a single game. At the time, however, the tour was big news. The teams were bid farewell by President Grover Cleveland and welcomed back by his successor, Benjamin Harrison. While they traveled, the New York Sun featured almost daily dispatches from correspondent Newton MacMillan on its front page. Upon their return, Mark Twain delivered a rollicking speech at a celebratory banquet in the famed New York eatery Delmonico's.

In Spalding's World Tour, Mark Lamster, a devoted baseball historian and an editor at Princeton Architectural Press, attempts a door-to-door account of the expedition. There's comparatively little play-by-play here, although most of the tour's 57 games warrant at least a brief accounting; for the true baseball buff, there is an appendix featuring, if not the full box scores, at least the results. Instead, Lamster draws on a host of journalistic accounts, published memoirs and diaries to convey the players' impressions of foreign lands, the shipboard banter, their misadventures at ports of call, as well as the logistical roadblocks to planning and promoting a round-the-world tour in the days before the Pacific cable.

Lamster is especially strong on the career of Spalding. Raised without a father from the age of 8 in the rural outskirts of Chicago, Spalding broke onto the baseball scene as a 17-year-old phenom who pitched his scrubby Rockford, Ill., club to a deeply improbable victory over a nationally known team of barnstormers based in Washington, D.C. Spalding is a towering figure in the development of baseball. He was the game's first true impresario and the architect of its founding myth, that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839.

The rest of Spalding's crew was hardly less memorable. At shortstop for the All-Americans was the great John Montgomery Ward, a Columbia-trained lawyer who, owing to an ongoing labor dispute over baseball's notorious reserve clause binding players to teams indefinitely, was plotting his upstart Players League even as he traveled the globe on Spalding's dime. The Chicago captain was Adrian Anson, the league's premiere player -- variously nicknamed "Cap," "The Baby" and "The Chicago Fakir" -- and one of the early practitioners of the "hit and run" play, an egomaniac and an incorrigible arguer with umpires. Anson was also, in Lamster's words, "the most visible proponent of the movement to keep blacks out of organized baseball"; his refusal to play against a team fielding black star Moses Walker directly led to baseball's official ban on black players in 1887.

There was one black American traveling with the team: mascot Clarence Duval, a diminutive baton twirler, comedian and singer of "plantation songs" who went on to tour with Bert Williams's minstrel show. Duval was the victim of the ballplayers' cruelest prank: When a 15-foot shark was sighted off the ship's bow as the teams plied the Indian Ocean, Anson offered to catch the fish using Duval as bait. Faced with Duval's abject terror, the captain rejected this suggestion, opting instead to use a hunk of salt pork.

The discordance between present and past attitudes about race and culture clouds Lamster's attempt at an uncomplicated embrace of the baseball tourists. Duval, for instance, is never quoted in journalistic accounts of the tour except as speaking in dialect. Of his visit to Ceylon, New York Herald correspondent Harry Palmer remembers that "the dusky inhabitants were thicker even than the Chinese in Chinatown, San Francisco." Lamster's willingness to quote firsthand observers at length is admirable, especially since many of them are at least his equal with the pen, but his efforts to place these remarks in the context of prevailing 19th-century views of race and culture come off more as an exercise in manners than the work of a practiced historian.

Spalding's Tour is today remembered mostly for an oft-reproduced photograph of a group of ballplayers arrayed around the Sphinx, where they played an impromptu baseball game and afterward took turns trying fruitlessly to hurl balls over the Pyramids. Lamster's book reintroduces a fascinating and long-overlooked chapter in baseball history to fans and historians and offers a glimpse at an early chapter in baseball's long march to globalization.

Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1586483110
• ISBN 13: 9781586483111
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368