The American Game: Baseball and Ethnicity

Frederick Ivor-Campbell, "The Many Fathers of Baseball: Anglo-Americans and the Early Game" Larry R. Gerlach, "German Americans in Major League Baseball: Sport and Acculturation" Richard F. Peterson, "'Slide, Kelly, Slide': The Irish in American Baseball" Jules Tygiel, "Unreconciled Strivings: Baseball in Jim Crow America" Lawrence Baldassaro, "Before Joe D: Early Italian Americans in the Major Leagues" Steven A. Riess, "From Pike to Green with Greenberg in Between: Jewish Americans and the National Pestime" Neal Pease, "Diamonds out of the Coal Mines: Slavic Americans in Baseball" Samuel O. Regalado, "The Latin Quarter in the Major Leagues: Adjustment and Achievement" Joel S. Franks, "Baseball and Racism's Traveling Eye: The Asian Pacific American Experience"

Lawrence Baldassaro, a professor of Italian and comparative literature and director of the University Honors Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is the editor of The Ted Williams Reader. Richard A. Johnson has served as the curator of the Sports Museum of New England since 1982. His seven books include DiMaggio: An Illustrated Life, The Twentieth-Century Baseball Chronicle, Red Sox Century, and Boston Braves.

"[T]oday baseball reflects the American population as well as or better than any other sport or enterprise. In fact, with each year, more and more of our players come from foreign countries, particularly the great talent that has come from the Caribbe an and Latin America. At the start of the 2000 majorleague baseball season, 198 players, nearly 24 percent of all players on major league rosters, were born outside the fifty states. They represented sixteen different foreign countries and Puerto Rico." - Bud Selig, Commissioner of Baseball, from the Foreword