| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ambassadors in Pinstripes: The Spalding World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire. By Thomas W. Zeiler. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. xiv, 217 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-7425-5168-8. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7425-5169-5.)

Historians of baseball remember Albert Goodwill Spalding as a mediocre player, as captain and manager of the Chicago White Stockings, as a very successful manufacturer of sporting goods, the publisher of Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide, as a zealous propagator of the Abner Doubleday myth, and as organizer of tours designed to popularize America's "national game" abroad. Thomas W. Zeiler describes Spalding's career (but less fully than Peter Levine does in his excellent 1985 biography, A. G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball) and the ambitious around-the-world tour that began in October 1888 and concluded in April 1889 (but less fully than did Harry Clay Palmer, the journalist who accompanied the players on their tour). What Zeiler adds to the familiar picture is a frame. He places Spalding's around-the-world tour in the context of the imperialistic ideology that eventually led to the creation of an American empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

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