Three Citations -- Kimmel essay

1. Kimmel quotes Albert J. Spalding's book America's National Game when he talks about the values that baseball players embodied. Two things were interesting to me about this particular citation: First, that Spalding's book was written in 1911, so it shows that the values of baseball trace back to its birth and that the idea of it instilling morality on the American populace can be linked to its popularity. Second, many of the values in Spalding's quote contain the word "American" (e.g. "American Courage"). It is interesting that American courage seems to be differentiated from "normal" courage and that baseball is uniquely able to provide that former.

2. Kimmel quotes William McKeever's Training the Boy when he talks about how the playing of baseball is necessary in the development of a boy. This quote interested me because it shows how as early as 1913, sports had been an integral part of the American childhood and that this idea that Kimmel talks about seems to be the origin of the phenomenon of every parent these days signing their children up to play AYSO soccer or Little League baseball at some point in their lives -- no matter how incompetent they might be at sports or how competent they might be at other, non-athletic things.

3. (I think all the things Kimmel quotes are books so I just chose one of the books and read a review of it on Jstor rather than skimming the whole book...) Kimmel quotes Donald Mrozeck's book Sport and the American Mentality: 1880-1910 and says that although baseball was originally a sport of the elite -- like many other sports -- it soon became a game played by and watched by lower-class men as well. Mrozeck's book talks about the development of sports in general (not just baseball) in America at the end of the 19th century. Mrozeck argues that sports came about as a form of physical regeneration to counteract the degenerative nature of factory/industrial work. Americans approached their recreational activities with all the same values that they approached other things (like work). Eventually, sports, and physical activity in general, became such a big phenomenon that it even supplanted religion as a major form of catharsis. Additionally, sports could be undertaken by anyone, not just the ultra rich.