Baseball used to be played everywhere in America. It was a game played from coast to coast by almost everyone, from factory workers to ivory-tower intellectuals. Any immigrant hoping to become a true American would learn how to play baseball. Its rise to the status of national pastime was a uniquely American story of a game growing up with a country, with the 1950s heralded as the game's golden age. Today, however, less than a third of television viewers watch the World Series than tuned in to see the lowest-rated Super Bowl of the last ten years. GOING, GOING &GONE? digs deep to explain how myriad factors--"competitive imbalance, owner greed, and a lack of vision for baseball's future as an industry--"contributed to the sport's decline. It explores baseball's checkered past and how those who run the national pastime squandered its dominant position among American sports and in American culture. From the uneven integration of the game to mismanaged franchise relocations and expansions in the 1950s and 1960s, the rise of professional football, and the sport's ongoing self-destructive obsessions with labor and publicly financed ballparks, GOING, GOING &GONE? points out how baseball went wrong and, more important, what can be done to bring it back.
- ISBN10 157488493X
- ISBN13 9781574884937
- Publish Date 1 February 2006
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 20 October 2003
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Potomac Books Inc
- Imprint Brassey's US
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 320
- Language English