Eric E. Whitehead

The book is, as you'd think, a primer about playing and appreciating baseball aimed at British sports fans. It was published in 1939.

According the author, in the book's Preface, "At the time of this writing, over six hundred English teams are registered with the National Baseball Association, and baseball has been adopted by camps of the Royal Air Force as a major part of their athletic curriculum. Capacity crouwds of well over ten thousand fans have become commonplace in certain sections of the country, and what is perhaps most significant of all is the fact that baseball is being investigated by education authorities with the probability of installing it as a major sport in the nation's schools."

According to an online history of baseball in England I found, there have been several attempts to popularize baseball in England, in the 1880s and 90s, in the 1910s and in the late 1930s. The effort of the 1930s was brought to an abrupt halt by the onset of World War II, and that was that. If we are to believe Whitehead's accounts, things were going pretty well, indeed, for a while, there. To me it's sort of poignant to be reading this brief (about 150 pages) description of the game, written in a breezy style that seeks to both inform and entertain. Overall, the tone of the writing is hopeful, maybe even confident, of baseball's eventually adoption by the sports fans of England. The poignancy comes from our knowledge of the cruel way that those hopes would almost immediately be smashed.… (mehr)