National Pastime; How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer

Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xii, [2], 263, [3] pages. Notes. Index. Stefan Szymanski is an economics professor who used to study important issues like the cost of garbage collection and labor market hierarchies, only to discover that people only read his work when he wrote about sports. So now he just write about sports. He recently moved from London, where he had lived almost all my life, to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Andrew Zimbalist has been in the economics department at Smith College since 1974 and has been a visiting professor at Doshisha University, the University of Geneva and Hamburg University. Zimbalist has consulted in Latin America for the United Nations Development Program, the U.S. Agency for International Development and numerous companies. He has consulted in the sports industry for players' associations, cities, companies, teams and leagues. Andrew Zimbalist received 2018 Henry Chadwick Award honoring baseball's great researchers, historians, statisticians, annalists, and archivists.2018 Henry Chadwick Award honoring baseball's great researchers, historians, statisticians,annalists, and archivists. This is the story of two great sports. One is "America's game," while the other is "the world's game." Baseball and soccer are both beloved cultural institutions. What draws fans to one game is often a mystery to fans of the other. Despite superficial differences, however, the business and culture of these sports share more in common than meets the eye. This is the first in-depth, cross-cultural comparison of these two great pastimes. In National Pastime, Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist illustrate how the different traditions of each sport have generated different possibilities for their commercial organization and exploitation. They pay special attention to the complex evolution of baseball from its beginnings in America, and they trace modern soccer from its foundation in England through its subsequent expansion across the world. They illustrate how Victorian administrators laid the foundation for Major League Baseball (MLB) and soccer leagues such as the English Premier League, Italy's Serie A, and the European Champions League. The authors show how the organizers of baseball and soccer have learned from each other in the past and how they can continue to do so.