The Perfect Game: America Looks at Baseball

For the ardent baseball fan, what sets the sport apart--what makes it "the perfect game"--are the treasured memories it evokes of a time gone by. This wonderfully nostalgic visual history celebrates more than 150 years of baseball's--and America's--past. Beginning in the 1840s and continuing through the end of the 20th century, the book and the American Folk Art Museum exhibition that it accompanies capture in portraits, watercolors, carvings, painted sign, lithographs, and a wide variety of everyday objects that are reminders of baseball the way it used to be.

The terracotta frieze from the original Yankee stadium, a hand-painted box office sign from an unidentified late 19th-century ballpark, and life-size carved wood figures are among the highlights of this visual feast for baseball fans, memorabilia collectors, and those who love American folk art and all Americana. Roger Angell, one of the outstanding baseball writers of our age, contributes some of his own cherished reminiscences of the national pastime.

Roger Angell, a writer and editor with The New Yorker, has been writing about baseball for more than 30 years. Elizabeth V. Warren was the Curator of the American Folk Art Museum from 1984 to 1990 and has been the museum's Consulting Curator since 1991.