Goldstein, Warren. Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. First Edition. ISBN: 0801418291. [10011]
Light blue cloth with dust jacket, fine clean condition, 9 1/2 x 6 1/4 inches, xi., 182 clean and unmarked pp. Fine in fine dust-jacket. Hardcover.
"In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century.
"Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades." - publisher.