Growing the game : the globalization of major league baseball / Alan M. Klein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Klein, Alan, 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Baseball--Economic aspects.

Baseball.

Globalization.

Sports and globalization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

A sociologist and anthropologist scientifically examines the worldwide growth of MLB and America's favorite pastime. Baseball fans understand the game has become increasingly international. Major league rosters include players from no fewer than fourteen countries, and more than one-fourth of all players are foreign born. Here, Alan Klein offers the first full-length study of a sport in the process of globalizing. Looking at the international activities of big-market and small-market baseball teams, as well as the Commissioner's Office, he examines the ways in which Major League Baseball operates on a world stage that reaches from the Dominican Republic to South Africa to Japan. The origins of baseball's efforts to globalize are complex, stemming as much from decreasing opportunities at home as from promise abroad. Klein chronicles attempts to develop the game outside the United States, the strategies that teams such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Kansas City Royals have devised to recruit international talent, and the ways baseball has been growing in other countries. He concludes with an assessment of the obstacles that may inhibit or promote baseball's progress toward globalization, offering thoughtful proposals to ensure the health and growth of the game in the United States and abroad. "A superb inside look at how the national pastime has reinvented itself... Klein's writing is engaging, and his research is top-notch." -Tim Wendel, author of The New Face of Baseball: The One-Hundred-Year Rise and Triumph of Latinos in America's Favorite Sport "A timely contribution to our understanding of baseball in our contemporary age." -Michael L. Butterworth, Sociology of Sport Journal

Contents:

Introduction

The crisis at the core

The Kansas City Royals : shopping without a credit card

The Los Angeles Dodgers : bright lights, big market

The Dominican Republic : fishing where the fish are

Japan : emerging from the feudal eclipse

Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom : the European backwater

South Africa : baseball and the new politics

When will there be a real world series?

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-274) and index.

ISBN:

9780300135121

0300135122

OCLC:

614480617