Is baseball a global sport? America's ‘national pastime’ as global field and international sport

Abstract

A myriad of organized sports and physical leisure activities took shape in the nineteenth century and spread quickly from the West to the Rest through imperial and mercantile circuits. Among them, the competitive team spectator sports of soccer, cricket, and baseball were perhaps the most consequential in reach and influence, adopted and adapted in what I have called elsewhere ‘uncanny mimicry’. The differences in the world histories of the three sports are as significant as their commonalities, and in this article I focus on some of the distinctive features of baseball's development in the USA and its move through the Caribbean and the western Pacific regions. Unlike soccer and cricket (and American football), baseball developed outside elite schools; it was fully commercialized and professionalized early on; it never had antagonisms or rivalries with amateur or school forms of the sport; and it never had very strong ideological associations with a ‘character’ ethic. On the other hand, it was quickly ‘nationalized’ as the American pastime, and in that image it was emulated and resisted in the locations in which it took root. The argument is extended through a case study of ‘samurai’ baseball in Japan and its uncanny mimicry.

Effectiveness of Stretching on Posterior Shoulder Tightness and Glenohumeral Internal-Rotation Deficit: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials

“…23,24 In Japan for instance, baseball is popular with the largest national spectatorship and the most extensive media coverage at both professional and amateur levels. 25 Thus, we suspected that the inclusion of Japanese-language studies could reduce the publication bias and complement international evidence base.…”

How global is U.S. Major League Baseball? A historical and geographic perspective

“…On one side, the interconnectedness process could be interpreted as the imperial expansion of leading Western economies to developing countries for new markets, raw materials, and cheap or skilled labor (Klein 2006;Kelly 2007). On the other side, the global interdependence also involves local responses from developing nations.…”

“…First, we add to the discourse of sports geography and globalization from a temporal-spatial perspective. A survey of literature reveals that many studies on the globalization of baseball are undertaken from a historical or sociological viewpoint but there is a significant lack of geographic perspective (Klein 1995;Klein 2001;Bale 2003;Keys 2004;Klein 2006;Kelly 2007). A few attempts have been made to incorporate spatial factors in the migration studies of baseball players, but they have covered a relatively short period of time (Chilba 2004;Lee and Lin 2007).…”

“…While in the early years most players in the professional leagues were domestic athletes, the game is becoming more globalized. International audiences, sports broadcasting, and sale of MLB merchandise overseas have expanded tremendously since the 1990s (Guevara and Fidler 2002;Klein 2006;Kelly 2007). The global expansion of MLB could also be measured by the participation of foreign-born players (Chiba 2004;Lee and Lin 2007).…”

“…Competition at soccer games in the World Cup or Olympics Games may become overheated as the championship is often associated with national pride (Bale 2003). As one part of globalization phenomena, sports are also viewed as a form of cultural and/or economic imperialism of Western countries due to their dominance in popular sports (Ley 1985;Klein 1995;Bale 1996;Bale 2003;Chiba 2004;Keys 2004;Klein 2006;Kelly 2007).…”