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Why Baseball Matters (Why X Matters Series)

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Baseball, first dubbed the "national pastime" in print in 1856, is the country's most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball's greatest charm -- a clockless suspension of time -- is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction.

These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position -- in reality and myth -- in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War -- when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps -- to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online "fantasy baseball" to attending real games.

Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather's bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball's history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.

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Price Summary

  • We started tracking this book on March 19, 2018.
  • This book was $24.68 when we started tracking it.
  • The price of this book has changed 170 times in the past 2,202 days.
  • The current price of this book is $14.29 last checked one day ago.
  • This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past 90 days is $12.77.
  • This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past six months is $12.46.
  • This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $12.08.
  • The lowest price to date was $9.40 last reached on February 23, 2021.
  • This book has been $9.40 one time since we started tracking it.
  • The highest price to date was $26.00 last reached on March 14, 2024.
  • This book has been $26.00 one time since we started tracking it.

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Additional Info

  • Text-to-Speech: Disabled
  • Lending: Disabled
  • Print Length: 219 Pages
  • File Size: 2,163 KB

We last verified the price of this book about one day ago. At that time, the price was $14.29. This price is subject to change. The price displayed on the Amazon.com website at the time of purchase is the price you will pay for this book. Please confirm the price before making any purchases.