Baseball and Cricket

How and why Americans chose baseball over its early rival, cricket, as the national pastime

In discovering how and why Americans chose baseball over its early rival, cricket, as the national pastime, George B. Kirsch takes us back to amateur playing fields around the country to recreate the excitement of the early matches, the players, clubs, and their fans. As a narrative history, Baseball and Cricket places the growing popularity of the two sports within the social context of mid-nineteenth-century American cities. The book's comparative analysis follows baseball's transition from a leisure sport to a commercialized, professional enterprise and offers the first complete discussion of the early American cricket clubs.

A volume in the series Sport and Society, edited by Benjamin G. Rader and Randy Roberts

George B. Kirsch is a professor of history at Manhattan College. He is the author of Baseball in Blue and Gray: the National Pastime during the Civil War, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the U.S. and volumes three and four of Sports in North America: A Documentary History.