Baseball for Everyone: 150 Years of America's Game - Hardcover

Janet Wyman Coleman is the author of Famous Bears & Friends: 100 Years of Teddy Bear Stories, Poems, Songs, and Heroics. Elizabeth V. Warren was the Curator of the American Folk Art Museum from 1984 to 1990, and has been the museum's Consulting Curator since 1991. She is the author of Abrams' The Perfect Game: America Looks at Baseball, and curator of the exhibition of the same name, opening at the American Folk Art Museum in June 2003.

Gr. 4-6. Based on an exhibition called The Perfect Game: America Looks at Baseball, this unusual anecdotal history of baseball, from eighteenth-century "town ball" to Sammy Sosa, is illustrated with American folk and outsider art related to the theme, plus an array of pictures of early balls, bats, and other artifacts. On topical spreads gathered within broad chronological sections, Coleman, aided by Elizabeth Warren, former curator of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, covers the growth of such developments as the Little, National, Negro, and Women's Leagues; reservation baseball; the game's international spread; its most renowned players (and goats); and its "New Heroes." The text frequently refers to the accompanying illustrations, and it occasionally highlights a particular artist, such as photographer Charles M. Conlon. Despite a few factual miscues (for instance, the "house that Ruth built" was hardly "the first baseball stadium in America"), this merits attention for showing baseball's integral relationship to American culture, and some of the creative ways in which ordinary fans have expressed their love for the game. John Peters
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