About the Author

Harold Seymour, Cornell University Ph.D., was a college history professor for more than fifteen years. He knows baseball firsthand through his experience as a batboy for the Brooklyn Dodgers, high school PSAL player, college captain, organizer and manager of amateur and semipro teams, and major-league bird dog.

Dorothy Seymour Mills is the author or co-author of 25 books, including historical novels and children's books. She is a member SABR, the North American Society for Sports History, and the Association for Women in Sports Media.

Reviews

"No one has done more to document the history of baseball than Harold Seymour....unique. Never before has so much information about baseball outside of the major and minor leagues been assembled between two covers, so much....Along the way he tells wonderful stories....[T]he remarkable breadth and richness of detail in Baseball: The People's Game will make it an essential reference work for historians of leisure, recreation, and sport for many
years."--Warren Goldstein, The Journal of American History
"Must reading for all lovers of the game and should be absolutely required for those who presume to meddle with its well-being and future....Significant not only for the history it tells, which is rich, detailed and lavishly researched, but for the questions it raises about baseball as a game and as a United States institution."--New York Times Book Review
"For three decades Harold Seymour has been not merely the most respected of the game's historians but also the standard-setter against whose work all other have been weighed....Both does [baseball] justice and pays it tribute."--Washington Post
"A scholarly, but very accessible, in-depth treasure-trove of baseball information and lore."--Kirkus Reviews

The poet Donald Hall once wrote that the beauty of baseball was saved ``by its peripheries''--by which he meant Little League, high school, college ball, etc. In his third volume on baseball, Seymour ( Baseball: The Early Years, LJ 11/1/60; Baseball: The Golden Age, 1971) offers a comprehensive history of the game at these levels and much more. In great detail and with exhaustive research, he pictures baseball as a house consisting of the foundation (sandlot), the basement (Native American and prison ball), the ground floor (amateur and semipro), an annex (women), and an outhouse (blacks). More than a poignant look at fields of dreams, this is a cultural history of America viewed through its national pastime. Particularly fascinating is the tension Seymour describes between the simplicity and freedom of the game itself and the structure and restraints that its organizers (on all levels) have imposed on it. A serious work, Seymour's Baseball is highly recommended for sports and popu lar culture collections.-- John R. Muether, Reformed Theological Seminary, Maitland, Fla.

"No one has done more to document the history of baseball than Harold Seymour....unique. Never before has so much information about baseball outside of the major and minor leagues been assembled between two covers, so much....Along the way he tells wonderful stories....[T]he remarkable breadth and richness of detail in Baseball: The People's Game will make it an essential reference work for historians of leisure, recreation, and sport for many years."--Warren Goldstein, The Journal of American History "Must reading for all lovers of the game and should be absolutely required for those who presume to meddle with its well-being and future....Significant not only for the history it tells, which is rich, detailed and lavishly researched, but for the questions it raises about baseball as a game and as a United States institution."--New York Times Book Review "For three decades Harold Seymour has been not merely the most respected of the game's historians but also the standard-setter against whose work all other have been weighed....Both does [baseball] justice and pays it tribute."--Washington Post "A scholarly, but very accessible, in-depth treasure-trove of baseball information and lore."--Kirkus Reviews