Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan

Robert K. Fitts

ISBN 10: 0803229844 / ISBN 13: 9780803229846

Published by Univ of Nebraska Pr, 2012

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803229844
• ISBN 13: 9780803229846
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Before the feuding owners turned to Ed Barrow to be general manager in 1920, the Yankees had never won a pennant. They won their first in 1921 and during Barrow’s tenure went on to win thirteen more as well as ten World Series. This biography of the incomparable Barrow is also the story of how he built the most successful sports franchise in American history.

 

Barrow spent fifty years in baseball. He was in the middle of virtually every major conflict and held practically every job except player. Daniel R. Levitt describes Barrow's pre-Yankees years, when he managed Babe Ruth and the Boston Red Sox to their last World Series Championship before the “curse.” He then details how Barrow assembled a winning Yankees team both by purchasing players outright and by developing talent through a farm system.

 

The story of the making of the great Yankees dynasty reveals Barrow’s genius for organizing, for recognizing baseball talent, and for exploiting the existing economic environment. Because Barrow was a player in so many of baseball’s key events, his biography gives a clear and eye-opening picture of how America’s sport was played in the twentieth century, on the field and off. A complex portrait of a larger-than-life character in the annals of baseball, this book is also an inside history of how the sport’s competitive environment evolved and how the Yankees came to dominate it.

About the Author

Robert K. Fitts is a curatorial consultant for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and a baseball historian. He is the author of eleven books of Japanese baseball, including Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers (Nebraska, 2020), Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan (Nebraska, 2013), and Mashi: The Unfulfilled Baseball Dreams of Masanori Murakami, the First Japanese Major Leaguer (Nebraska, 2015), and is the coeditor of Nichibei Yakyu: U.S. Tours of Japan, volumes I and II.