G.Edward White, a social historian and baseball fan, talks about his new book, Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903-1953. In a conversation with another legal scholar and baseball connoisseur, Vincent Blassi, Professor White describes how baseball, which began as a marginal urban sport associated with drinking and gambling, became more than a ritual of childhood, an emblem of American individuality and fair play, or an idyllic search for myth. Rather, as it evolved through the Progressive Era, it was the seemingly irrational business decisions, inspired in part by the self-interest of the owners but also by their nostalgia for the game that helped to transform baseball into the national pastime.
Creating the National Pastime
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