Dissertations on the Subject of Baseball

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume III (1988).

 

If academic dissertations on baseball literature and baseball history provide a fruitful scholarly resource, this is not yet common knowledge among our active baseball researchers. Confirmation of the anonymity surrounding this rich body of work is provided in a curious statement buried within a recent issue of The SABR Bulletin.

Here we learn from a report of the SABR Microfilm Committee (December 1986) that Edward Nichols’ pioneering 1939 Ph.D. thesis (Pennsylvania State University) is “perhaps still the only dissertation on baseball completed in a Department of English at an American University.” What is more distressing than the mere inaccuracy of this statement is what it reveals about the relative obscurity still surrounding academic work on baseball history and baseball culture.

That such inaccuracies should be fostered by SABR, of all groups, further masks the degree to which baseball has remained a favorite pastime (albeit often a secretive passion) of hundreds of American scholars and academics. More importantly, it works to direct aspiring students of the game away from one of the richest if least-mined veins of information on the early history as well as the literary potential of our fascinating national pastime.

Baseball dissertations, then, remain one of the richest resources for scholarly interpretation of baseball, and yet at the same time one of the least explored sources available to students of baseball history and baseball literature. This report is intended as a guide for those wishing to explore these existing academic resources of our Literary Baseball.

“Abstract” summaries are provided below for nineteen readily accessible baseball dissertations on historical and literary topics, all focusing on baseball as a subject in American literary or cultural studies. I have narrowed my survey here to those Ph.D. theses which explore in detail the impact of baseball on American life and American letters; this listing is therefore not exhaustive of all doctoral dissertations which, after one fashion or another, touch either directly or obliquely on baseball as a subject of academic inquiry. This survey is nonetheless hopefully representative of the considerable degree to which American scholars have found baseball and baseball culture a challenging and fascinating subject for scholarly inquiry

Doctoral dissertations exploring baseball as a literary subject hold considerable significance, then, for scholars of both baseball history and American culture: these works chronicle the emergence of a serious adult baseball fiction and explore various important aspects of this emerging literary genre. Baseball dissertations on historical topics also hold a similar scholarly value: together they provide a body of writings which help explain precisely why a serious baseball literature and fiction develop, as they do, only after 1950. And they record as well the historical background on which that fiction continues to draw for its vital socio-cultural perspectives and for its fertile intellectual life source. These scholarly works explore precisely why popular baseball themes of “the pastoral,” “the non-urbanj’ and “the non-commercial” arise only after the national sport has effectively lost its folk roots and today become largely an urban commercial spectacle.

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Dissertations on Baseball in American Literature

Bowles, Francis P. America at Bat: The Baseball Hero in Life and Letters
Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of New Mexico, 1980 (no DAI catalog listing, abstract or order number; available only through inter-library loan from the University of New Mexico Graduate Library).

The argument gracefully advanced here is that the game of professional baseball, along with its players, reflects psychological and moral truths about the American national experience. Baseball and the men who play it together “embody the collective drives and aspirations of the larger society around them.” This study takes social history as its organizing frame, defining baseball as a central American social institution. From this viewpoint, the “dead-ball” era of the early 20th century as well as the slugging era of the ’20s closely mirror national life during these two remarkably different historical periods. Individual chapters focus on a number of important baseball personages who in themselves reflect contemporary American values and issues: Albert Spalding is presented in the perspective of the Horatio Alger novels; Christy Mathewson is seen as a living embodiment of Gilbert Patten’s Frank Merriwell image which dominated sporting fiction at the turn of the century; John Montgomery Ward’s “Brotherhood Rebellion” provides almost perfect counterpoint to the economic stance of Albert Spalding, just as John McGraw provides an instructive contrast to the conception of the baseball hero created by the fiction of Patten and the on-field play of Mathewson. Following a line of argumentation developed by Tristram Coffin, Bowles demonstrates as well that baseball heroes such as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Judge Landis complete the normal developmental process of national folklore by personifying expected American types (the ideal prowess hero, the trickster, the ethical figure.) A controversial thesis concerning the position of blacks in American baseball suggests that “because black stars in the major leagues have refused to act out the stereotyped “Old Coon” role that whites have expected them to play, Satchel Paige is the only Negro star to achieve legendary status” within baseball’s national mythology.

Candelaria, Cordelia (Chavez). Baseball in American Literature: From Ritual to Fiction.
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Notre Dame, 1976 (200 pp). DAI 37, No. 01, 305-A (Order no. DDJ76-16493).

Explicates the serious adult novel-length prose fiction about baseball produced through the mid-1970s, exclusive of youth baseball novels and other pulp dime-novels devoted to the sport during the earlier half of the present century. Two types of novels are covered: those in which baseball plays only a minor role as one of the several competing organization metaphors, and those in which baseball is the controlling and dominant literary figure, one which establishes the novel’s controlling themes. A central socio-historical thesis emerges: “baseball fiction as a body shows a progression from the simpler dimensions of romanticism and realism to the more complex ironic and autotelic modes, [and this progression] has a cultural correlative in baseball itself.”

Paralleling the complex evolution of our baseball fiction is the evolution of the on-field game as well, from the native 19th-century folk ritual to the increasingly sophisticated and commercialized professional endeavor of the twentieth century. An ever-widening distance between ballgame and folk population is seen as distinctly in the literary uses of baseball as it is in the emergence of the spectator sport itself. The shift in baseball fiction from simply structured and simply narrated action-packed stories to acutely solipsistic fiction is demonstrated with works of such recent novelists as Malamud (The Natural), Coover (The Universal Baseball Association), John Alexander Graham (Babe Ruth Caught in a Snowstorm), and Roth (The Great American Novel).

Dagavarian, Debra. A Descriptive Analysis of Baseball Fiction in Children’s Periodicals: 1880-1950.
Ed.D. Dissertation. Rutgers University, 1987 (no DAI catalog listing, abstract, or order number; inter-library loan available from Rutgers University Libraries)

The research purpose here is to explore and describe content from an important American cultural artifact: children’s periodical fiction treating the game of baseball. Children’s magazine baseball fiction is analyzed in terms of social and historical origins, as well as intended audience, with a controlling assumption that such fiction plays a vital part in any socialization process for the individual child. The content of such children’s literature is also examined for purposes of shedding light on social roles and interactional patterns that are distinctly unique to American culture.

A largely thematic method of analysis is employed: thirty-five stories were selected from major children’s periodicals dating from the period 1880-1950. Only stories containing the playing of baseball in some form are included and these stories are described through plot explication and identification of primary themes. Five major themes arise here: 1) interpersonal support, 2) individual responsibility, 3) sacrifice in the face of defeat, 4) human modesty, and 5) the value of fair play.

Such recurring popular baseball themes are related to structural aspects of the act of baseball playing viz., pacing of the game, configuration in the system of play, and mentorship relationships on the field of play. While no salient trends in the thematic analysis were uncovered, it is demonstrated that the nature of the baseball stories examined was clearly didactic in intent, aimed at transmitting idealized American values through the medium of apparently light and entertaining childhood reading materials

Golubaw, Saul. Baseball as Metaphor in American Fiction
Ph.D. Dissertation. The State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1975 (234pp). DAI 36, No. 06, 3712-A (Order no. DDJ75-26148).

A critical and historical overview of ways in which baseball has been utilized as appropriate metaphor in American fiction, from late 19th-century novels (e.g., Noah Brooks’ The Fairport Nine) down to the present (especially The Great American Novel and The Natural.) The earliest metaphorical use of baseball emerged in the visionist period of 1880 to 1919, employing the game not only to relate an exciting sports story but also to honor American values and an American way of life as well. Widespread public disillusionment with the sport in wake of the Black Sox scandal led inevitably to “a more complex and adult revisionist fiction in which not only what occurs on the field is important, but also what transpires off the diamond.” Writers such as Ring Lardner and Heywood Broun begin utilizing the national pastime to “accuse, indict, and castigate America for a host of moral failures.” Evolution of an emerging notion of the game of baseball as meaningless experience and its players as clowns and morons leads next to non-serious baseball narrative (Thurber and Roth) in which the game “is not so much metaphor as it is gag or slapstick routine.”

A conclusion of this thesis is that The Natural ultimately provides “the total baseball metaphor,” a work in which “the romance of the early period, the scorn of the revisionists, and the prankish humor of the non-serious writers all come together” as Malamud utilizes baseball to portray a relationship between a native American hero and a wasteland American society within which he must reside. Golubcow also demonstrates precisely why “with the game as instant metaphor for all of America, a baseball writer is almost destined to fail in covering everything that might be contained in the national experience.” He thus maintains that baseball fiction by its very nature is doomed to fall short of its total goal.

Harrison, Walter Lee. Out of Play: Baseball Fiction from Pulp to Art
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of California, Davis, 1980 (172pp). DAI 41, No. 09, 4033-A (Order no. DDJ81-05383).

A definition of baseball games as ritualized combat and highly structured and ritualized significant mock actions is provided within the framework of Jonathan Huizinga’s conception of “play elements” in American culture. Each player of the contest maintains a uniquely defined role in which his actions are permanently integrated with those of his teammates; the game provides a perfect balance between the concept of single combat (pitcher versus batter) and a cooperative team competition through which victory can only jointly be obtained.

An exceedingly small but articulate body of popular late 19th and early 20th century fiction provides the most appropriate literary expression of baseball’s highly formulaic pattern as sport and as artistic subject: “the perilous quest of a family of brothers” to win a pennant in a season-long combat through symbolic warfare, while isolated from the debilitating forces of the everyday world. While Noah Brooks’ Our Baseball Club (the earliest baseball novel) focuses on the unity of team as single-entity, Zane Grey’s The Young Pitcher introduces the concept of the single baseball hero, whose ultimate test is “to avoid insidious corruption from the world outside the baseball diamond.”

Popular fictional baseball stars become literary models reflecting sacred American values, yet temptations of American culture increasingly act to corrupt the sterile and idealized baseball world. While Ring Lardner’s heroes (especially Jack Keefe in You Know Me Al) fail to understand the significance of their actions as baseball heroes, Mark Harris extends Lardner’s realistic tradition by providing a hero-narrator (Henry Wiggen) who can realize both potentials and limitations in the baseball star as human hero. Harrison concludes that The Natural provides “the most direct expression of the ritualistic importance of baseball” in which “the perilous quest of the baseball season parallels the medieval quest for the Holy Grail.” Extending this pattern of baseball as perilous symbolic quest, such other recent important baseball novels as Universal Baseball Association, The Great American Novel, Philip O’Connor’s Stealing Home, together extend the exploration of the role of baseball as significant element within American culture. 

Kinsley, Patrick Allen. The Interior Diamond: Baseball in Twentieth Century American Poetry and Fiction
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Colorado at Boulder, 1978 (275pp). DAI 39, No. 05, 2939-A (Order no. DDJ78-20530).

Aims to merge the historical and aesthetic realities of baseball with the literary, mythological and cultural importance of the fiction and poetry inspired by the game itself. In some of this literature, baseball symbolizes an ordered pastoral realm, outside of time, where motion emerges as ritual; other baseball literature portrays a corrupt world which, as a reflection of American culture itself, has fallen from idyllic promise to moral inferiority and tainted materialism. Baseball has also been utilized as a fictional metaphor for the art and craft of a literary creation itself. Together these thematic and metaphorical uses of the national game constitute a significant tradition within serious American literature of the twentieth century.

This study devotes separate chapters to the baseball poetry, the fiction of Ring Lardner, the Henry Wiggen novels of Mark Harris, The Natural, Universal Baseball Association, The Great American Novel, and Herrin’s Rio Loja Ringmaster. Kinsley demonstrates that each of the novelists examined sees baseball as a rich symbolic construct, an entirely unique sport providing its own sense of history, ritual, legend, and native American myth. With a season stretching from early spring to early fall, baseball invites explicitly comparison with the seasons of life and growth; its patterns of structured form superimposed upon an artificial landscape furthermore suggest “both the hortus conclusus of the pastoral genre and the creation of a work of art.”

Kudler, Harvey. Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural” and Other Oedipal Analogs in Baseball Fiction
Ph.D. Dissertation. St. Johns University, 1976 (305pp). DAI 37, No. 09, 5829-A (Order no. DDJ77-01581).

Aims to explain the surrealistic plot and apparently symbolic characters of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural in a manner that would properly place this novel within the canon of Malamud’s own later fiction, as well as within a tradition of baseball novels developed over the two decades following the appearance of Roy Hobbs. Kudler argues that Malamud built his novel as a symbolic analog to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, in the same fashion that James Joyce retold the Ulysses legend in the guise of the modern adventures of Leopold Bloom. He contends as well that Malamud constructed a metaphorical baseball novel, utilizing both mythic and Freudian sexual analogs, and in doing so “he created the archetype for the serious baseball novel, describing the game of baseball as primarily an Oedipal duel, with murderous intent on both sides, between a father figure — the pitcher — and his young son, the batter at ‘home’ plate.”

To support this presumed mythic underpinning of the novel, one chapter fully explicates “ironic metaphors” in The Natural, thus deciphering apparent extensive Joycean plot conventions. To demonstrate the presence of a theme of Freudian psychosexual guilt as well as a theme of Sophoclean mythic guilt, a second chapter focuses on the heavy use of such phallic symbols as Hobbs’ bat Wonderboy. Promoted as well is the weighty claim that overall structures and patterns in the game of baseball are inherently Oedipal, and that Malamud was only the first of several baseball novelists “to intuit this phenomenon and interpret it artistically.” Other symbolically Oedipal baseball novels are taken to be Universal Baseball Association, Bang the Drum Slowly, and The Great American Novel.

Lass, Terry Russell. Discoveries of Mark Harris and Henry Wiggen
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Missouri, 1986 (210pp). DAI 47, No. 10, 3757-A (Order no. DA8701387)

Argues that Mark Harris’ tetralogy of Henry Wiggen baseball novels is a “significant but overlooked achievement in contemporary American fiction.” The Southpaw (1953) is seen as the best of the Harris novels, one in which Henry Wiggen “serves his apprenticeship as an amateur athlete, enters the world of professional baseball, undergoes a series of physical and moral trials, and emerges with a story to tell and a style to tell it.” Henry Wiggen’s personal journey of self-exploration and self-discovery is examined in detail throughout three chapters which review the middle novels of the sequence, Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) and A Ticket for A Seamstitch (1957.) A separate chapter traces Henry’s widening social consciousness, his acceptance of the possibilities of social community, and his emergence as an important fictional hero of the ’50s. A final chapter is devoted to the more recent revival of the Henry Wiggen figure in the 1979 novel It Looked Like Forever, as well as drawing critical evaluations of Harris’ baseball tetralogy from a number of unusual and diverse contemporary sources.

Merrell, David Boles. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”: Baseball as Determinant in Selected American Fiction
Ph.D. Dissertation. Texas A&M University, 1979 (196pp). DAI 40, No. 12, 6281-A (Order no. DDJ80-11975)

While novels representing serious baseball fiction have provided several distinctive types of narrative perspective, in all such novels “baseball serves as a determinant of microcosm, character, structure, action, and ethics.” Merrell illustrates this thesis with the following exemplary novels and competing narrative modes: Lardner’s You Know Me Al (a first-person epistolary novel); Harris’ trilogy of Henry Wiggen’s stories (first-person peripheral viewpoint); The Natural (third-person omniscient narrative); and Universal Baseball Assocation (metafictional novel utilizing a central reflector and eventual unmediated reflection of the fictional world). The ordered social world of baseball provides a perfect analog and microcosm for larger American society; baseball novelists like Lardner, Harris, and Malamud place fictional players and teams within actual major league settings, while Roth and Coover create fictional leagues parallel to the features of real professional baseball. Characters populating these novels are drawn from stereotypes of the baseball hero, in the model of Babe Ruth, Joe Jackson, or other representative heroic or tragic (or even comic) real-life baseball figures.

The seasonal cycle of baseball also provides a determinant for the time frame of narrative action: “the feeling of baseball time as determined by the individual game suggests the timeless past and the timeless future.” Narrative action and a moral-ethical framework for such fictive action are also strictly determined by parameters of the actual game of baseball. If action in the baseball novel falls within the bounds of plausible or recorded baseball history (is in line with past statistics and baseball legends), then realism is achieved within the novel; if action and event are improbable, then the novel evolves into fantasy. Baseball’s narrowly and precisely defined ethics (e.g., codes exist for players’ actions, and certain actions such as stealing the catcher’s signs are condoned) provide the means for judging character and action within the baseball story. The novels of Lardner, Harris Malamud, and Roth demonstrate the degree to which the microcosmic world of baseball efficiently functions as a determining vehicle in the structuring of American fiction.

Reynolds, Charles Dewey Hilles. Baseball as the Material of Fiction
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Nebraska, 1974 (272pp). DAI 35, No. 05, 3005-A (Order no. DDJ74-23931)

Although rapid growth of baseball popularity in the middle nineteenth century led to a labeling of the sport as the “national pastime” as early as 1850, it was a full century later before serious baseball fiction caught the nation’s attention. Reynolds explains that adult baseball fiction appeared precisely at a time when the game was being systematically divorced from its adoring public through extensive commercialism (through “big-business baseball” with its TV coverage, elaborate farm systems, and crass commercialism.) By 1950 adults had taken over the child’s game and television had transformed “the country game” into a big-city business which resulted in “a distant activity viewed in a small box.”

Reynolds focuses on three aspects of the literary handling of baseball within serious adult treatments after 1950. The sociological aspect reflects idealism concerning the national pastime as melting pot: city-country distinctions are paramount in baseball fiction because “a country player’s triumphs assert the American Dream,” while socio-economic barriers such as race are rarely mentioned in baseball fiction (the issue not even being considered until Eliot Asinof’s Man on Spikes.) The imaginative aspect focuses on potential fictional means of overcoming limits of probability in treating a sport based so heavily on the mathematical boundaries of a playing field and on the game’s relevant statistics. The Natural is taken to illustrate how the serious baseball novelist has utilized baseball’s own inherent mythology, rather than trying to create an original mythology for baseball fiction. The moral aspect explores the problem of “ideal versus real,” with The Southpaw taken as the first novel “to show baseball’s moral dichotomy seriously as an issue for the player,” and Malamud’s story extending the conflict to the issue of “the fixed game” and the nature of heroism. Writers of baseball fiction before 1950 had focused largely upon play on the field. But television has unraveled baseball from the fabric of American life, and “with aesthetic distance and separation of the game in literature from the game on the field, baseball has now become a worthy subject for a serious American fiction.

Smith, Leverett T., Jr. The American Dream and the National Game
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1970 (553pp). DAI 32, No. 03, 1530-A (Order no. 718267).

Aims to demonstrate similarities between literary culture and American culture at large; this is attempted through analysis of both literary documents (literary masterpieces and materials from the field of professional sports, especially from baseball) and historical documents from the realm of popular culture, in the effort to see if both hold political and social values in common. Smith’s thesis is summarized as follows: “that the concept of play, which led a perilous existence in the literature of the 19th century and early 20th century because of the predominance of the work ethic, has, since the end of World War I, begun to gain the kind of status the work ethic once had, and that this ethic is now equally visible in literary works and in the world of professional sports as an ethic-alternative to the supposed ethics of the commercial democratic society as a whole.”

Baseball-related sections include a chapter on the writings of Ring Lardner, a chapter on the evolution of professional baseball between 1919 and 1922 and the impact of the Black Sox on baseball’s relationship to a commercial society, and a section studying the public images of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth and their crucial relations to shifting values of a commercialized democracy.

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Dissertations on Baseball in American Culture and American History

Furst, R. Terry. The Image of Professional Baseball: The Sport Press and the Formation of Ideas About Baseball in Nineteenth Century America
Ph.D. Dissertation. New School for Social Research, 1986 (363pp). DAI 47, No. 06, 2323-A (Order no. DA8616022)

Describes and analyzes the process by which the collective image of professional baseball was formed, tracing both negation and affirmation of ideas within the popular sports press which worked to impede or promote the growth of professional baseball from its role as recreational pastime to its emergence as a popular spectator sport in 19th-century America. Furst demonstrates that the public image of baseball fostered through the sporting press was never a stable one: conflict arose from competing images of an older, social-recreational approach to playing the game and a newer and much more competitive professional style of play.

Such important early baseball events as the Cincinnati Red Stockings tour of 1869 are traced through their press accounts, with attention given equally to editorial commentaries, evaluative descriptions by sports reporters, and judgmental reader-letters to the editors of major dailies. It is clear that “the image of professional baseball grew, not as a unitary concept, but rather as a composite of attributes stemming from an interactive complex …  including both reportage and reading of baseball matters in the sport press, discussion of baseball within social and occupational networks, game attendance and changing values (sic) towards work and play.

Goldstein, Warren Jay. Playing for Keeps: A History of American Baseball, 1857-1876
Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale University, 1983 (304pp). DAI 44, No. 09, 2808-A (Order no. DEQ83-29232).

Demonstrates through baseball — the principal if not the only major spectator sport of the late 19th century — the changing and emerging relationships between the experiences of work and play. What results by the turn of the century is the unique notion that these were in fact distinct spheres of human activity. Because the organized game of baseball first emerged from and flourished in a culture and community of skilled urban craftsmen, the language of the game rapidly became barely distinguishable from the language of productive labor; the result was also that players as well as commentators on the game “stressed the skillful play which produced ballfield victories.”

A central focus of this dissertation is the profound transformation of baseball (from club-based fraternal game featuring skilled craftsmen to entertainment business supported by gate receipts) which transpired during the two decades between 1857 and 1876. Club management and sport commentators of this period first introduced the language and practices of “management” and an inevitable result was that relationships between team management and players evolved to parallel that between employers and their workers in all other phases of the American business community. Founding of the National League in 1876 was the first formal association of clubs rather than players, and this action formalized the existing trend toward institutionalizing the new commercial structure of American baseball.

But as baseball emerged as an institution of commercialized leisure activity it also maintained an ideology of “pure recreation” (the myth of the “democratic pastime” now far removed from the anxieties of the daily workplace); this dichotomy in baseball’s public image grew out of an internal development of the game from pure club sport of amateur flavor into profitable business, replete with its own highly specialized professional workplace (the ballpark)

Haven, Jeffrey Lawrence. Baseball: The Origins and Development of the Game to 1903.
Ed.D. Dissertation. Brigham Young University, 1979 (232pp). DAI 40, No. 02, 1027-A (Order no. DDJ79-18437).

Focusing on the development of the institution of baseball within the 19th-century American society, this work narrates the historical evolution of the sport from its American origins through the mergers of the National and American Leagues in 1903. Haven emphasizes both a narrative account, which will interest sports enthusiasts, as well as more analytical assessment, which provides significant discussion for scholars of American social history. Historically accurate accounts are provided for the birth of the game in its American version, expansion and development of baseball from the first amateur clubs to touring professional teams, the growth in professionalism under the auspices of the National Baseball League, commercialization within the business of professional baseball and dominant players and teams of the game’s first half-century. 

Hull, Adrian Louis. The Linguistic Accommodation of a Cultural Innovation as Illustrated by the Game of Baseball in the Spanish Language of Puerto Rico
Ph.D. Dissertation. Columbia University, 1963 (399pp). DAI 25, No. 12, 7256 (Order no. 64-09884)

Since no Spanish-speaking countries have an indigenous counterpart to the North American game of baseball, adoption of this game by the native culture of Puerto Rico caused linguistic difficulties of considerable impact, especially in terms of the words and expressions necessary to describe adequately the objects, actions, practices, and events of the game. Methods are explored by which a native Puerto Rican population resolved this problem both through utilization of native Spanish-language resources as well as borrowings from American English speech. Hull identifies and also defines linguistic interference emerging from language-contact situations involving the importation of American baseball to the Puerto Rican island nation; the study is largely synchronic in its focus on Puerto Rican baseball language over the four previous years, including the lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and orthographic levels of usage.

A principal source for oral language was the recording of radio broadcasts of baseball games; written materials were gathered from local newspaper accounts of game results and game action. No effort was made, however to distinguish between social, regional, colloquial, or literary levels of language usage, it being assumed here that baseball attracts an audience from all walks of life and that those following the game utilize common expressions and a highly specialized vocabulary also common to the sport.

Four central observations summarize the observed language-change phenomena which has accompanied the cultural innovation of baseball in Puerto Rico: 1) evidence exists for an accelerated language change in the Puerto Rican Spanish used in connection with the game of baseball; 2) evidence exists for deviations from the norm on all linguistic levels (phonological, syntactic, etc.) in Spanish employed to discuss baseball; 3) American English baseball language exerts a strong influence on Puerto Rican Spanish baseball language; and 4) evidence suggests that some deviations in Spanish baseball language are not at all due to any linguistic influence of American baseball language, but rather to natural evolution within the Spanish language forms. 

Kammer, David John. Take Me out to the Ballgame: American Cultural Values as Reflected in the Architectural Evolution and Criticism of the Modern Baseball Stadium
Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1982 (407 pp). DAI 43, No. 10, 3356-A (Order no. DEP83-04350)

Elaborates the unique thesis that “using traditional modes of architectural criticism and then expanding them to encompass popular cultural tastes, one can trace the changes in the ballpark as reflecting changes in American society at large, particularly in the areas of urban demography, transportation, and mass entertainment.” Kammer suggests that while the urban baseball stadium has long been an American fixture, no one has previously examined any serious social implications of changes in architectural style, construction technology, or urban location. Construction of three representative ballparks (Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium, and the Houston Astrodome) is explored as a significant reflection of important advances in building technology evolving through three distinct generations of such concrete and steel stadia. A surprising thesis results: with emphasis on middle-class access to the stadium, more luxurious spectator facilities, and increasing standardization in playing-field appearance and dimensions, the more modern baseball stadium can be taken to reflect “a more homogenized, mobile and spectacle-oriented society” than that which preceded World War I. 

Voigt, David Quentin. Cash and Glory: The Commercialization of Major League Baseball as a Sports Spectacular
D.S.S. Dissertation. Syracuse University, 1962 (505pp). DAI 24, No. 01, 425-A (Order no. 63-3637).

Traces the history of baseball as a by-product of large-scale industrialization and of a related and historically unique problem of increased leisure time available to working-class masses. Voigt portrays baseball from its earliest appearance as an amateur sport for gentlemanly participants, through its transformation by the final decade of the nineteenth century into a highly commercialized sporting spectacle providing significant new leisure outlets for the masses of middle-class urbanites.

Some primary sources of data for this study are personal correspondences, books, and other records authored by such participants in l9th-century baseball as managers, players, club administrators, and professional sports journalists. Several important observations and descriptions are also drawn from sporting journals and magazines, baseball guides and manuals of the period, and reporting in hometown newspapers on each pennant-winning team of the era. Baseball is treated from a largely sociological frame of reference; the unique American national pastime is here described as a newly emerging type of socially significant leisure-time outlet, as “a sports spectacular catering to the psychological needs of increasingly urbanized Americans.

NOTE: In addition to the seventeen dissertations discussed in this report, two additional early projects also exist which pre-date all published DAI catalog abstracts. These pioneer non-abstracted dissertations are perhaps the most widely cited of those studies treating historical topics; certainly they are the best-known among scholars not yet familiar with the larger inventory of baseball dissertations

Nichols, Edward J. An Historical Dictionary of Baseball Terminology
Ph.D. Dissertation. The Pennsylvania State University, 1939 (112pp). DAI 2,196 (no DAI abstract provided — Order no. 00-00127).

Detailed historical accounts are provided for “origins” of most of the terms, labels, and concepts of the national pastime, with significant insight provided into the evolution of our national game against the social backdrop of nineteenth-century industrialization. This work is now mainly significant from a bibliographical or historical perspective, being the first major academic study of baseball carried out in a college English Department.

Seymour, Harold. The Rise of Major League Baseball to 1891
Ph.D. Dissertation. Cornell University, 1956 (659pp). DAI 16, 2145 (no DAI abstract provided – Order no. 0019159).

A detailed history of baseball’s first half-century, this is the earliest draft of parts of Seymour’s pioneer research later published as volume one (Baseball: The Early Years, Oxford University Press, 1960) of his landmark two-volume social history of the national pastime. Little is found here that is not later available, in more polished form, in the book version treating the same material. This is still, however, the most painstaking academic history of the game’s early decades.