Baseball: A Celebration! by James Buckley, Dorling Kindersley Publishing Staff, Jim Gigliotti

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Baseball's superstars, along with the owners, adoring fans, and children who have orbited the game like a curve ball through its storied history, are the subjects of more than 700 prize photographs in this 600-plus-page coffee-table book extraordinaire.

Baseball: A Celebration! illustrates the game from its inception. The history stretches back further than most people realize: More than 150 years before the Yankees beat the Mets, 4–2, at Shea Stadium to finish off the 2000 Subway Series, the New York Base Ball Club pummeled the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, 23–1, at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. Each era has had its icons: Predating Ichiro Suzuki by nearly a century was Ty Cobb. Fenway Park, one of the many historic stadiums illustrated, hosted them both.

The book is organized in chronological fashion, with an introduction to each decade of the 1900s. Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Jack Morris, Kirby Puckett, Steve Carlton, Reggie Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, Roy Campanella, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, and many other legends are photographed on and off the field. Private Willie Mays is pictured in military uniform, and Ted Williams is pictured piloting a jet fighter. Indicative of how woven the game is into American culture and psyche, Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Reagan are photographed in baseball-related activities, be it acting, gabbing, or cutting a deal for the Texas Rangers.

Not to be forgotten, women ballplayers, dating as far back as 1868, and Little Leaguers are photographed throughout. A criticism of Baseball: A Celebration! is that there may be better ways to organize the history than a simple chronology. Then again, when dealing with such an expansive and unwieldy topic, there are benefits to keeping it simple. (Brenn Jones)

From the Publisher

Baseball is a game we first play as children, but love for all of our lives. This book takes you on a visual journey through the history of baseball, using more than 700 historic, evocative, emotional, and colorful photographs that bring to life the faces, places, moments, and memories that have made the game America's National Pastime. Celebrate the game with everyone from the greatest Major League stars to the youngest sandlot players. Relive the march of memories that have given baseball its constant sense of nostalgia, even as every day brings new thrills to the diamonds of the world. Baseball: A Celebration! spans the entire history of the game, from its earliest days on rough fields drawn up by determined sportsmen through the heady days of the early pro game; from the Golden Age of Babe Ruth to the magic time when New York City was the center of the baseball universe; through the color and flash of the 1960s, all the way to the sky-high home runs of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and other stars of today. Featuring photographs drawn from the world's greatest repositories of baseball imagery, including Major League Baseball Photos and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and fact-filled narrative commentary on each photograph by veteran sportswriters James Buckley, Jr., and Jim Gigliotti, Baseball! A Celebration takes you out to the ballgame, page after glorious page.

New York Daily News

Quite simply one of the best coffee table baseball books in years...

Library Journal

Through a series of both little-known and easily recognized photographs, the authors (prolific sportswriters and editors) of this hefty volume present a stunning visual celebration of America's most enduring sport. For example, the first 60 pages, covering the era 1845-99, contain such treats as a series of photographs capturing early star George Wright displaying batting and fielding techniques; paired photos of Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first black major leaguer during the 19th century, and Cap Anson, who helped drive African Americans from organized baseball; and the legendary King Kelly. The rest of the book is grouped by decade, with Lou Gehrig appearing in Yankee Stadium after his consecutive games streak had ended, Ted Williams shown as a Korean War pilot, and President John F. Kennedy tossing out the ball for the Washington Senators' home opener in 1962. Somewhat greater textual analysis might have been welcomed, but the near-absolute focus on photographic representations is hard to dispute. For general libraries. R.C. Cottrell, California State Univ., Chico Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

When Steve Howe closed out the Dodgers' 9-2 victory over the Yankees in Game 6 of the 1981 World Series, photographer Jayne Kamin-Oncea was there to capture moment.

Kamin-Oncea got a joyous shot of the three Steves -- Howe, first baseman Steve Garvey, and catcher Yeager -- celebrating on the infield. In the locker room, there were hugs and champagne spray all around, and Kamin-Oncea photographed much of the drama.

But she missed the one shot she really wanted.

"I wanted to capture the emotion from the dugout just as they won it," she says. "So I told myself that the next time I would be ready with a remote."

She had to wait until 1988. After the Dodgers built a 3-1 lead over the Oakland A's in the World Series, Kamin-Oncea was prepared for the celebration following Los Angeles's 5-2 win in Oakland in Game 5.

"I had a remote with a foot switch focused on the dugout," she says. "I shot the mound, as usual, but this time I also got them coming out of the dugout."

The result was a memorable photo of the Dodgers as they claimed the franchise's sixth world title.

You'll find the photograph on the previous page. It's one of hundreds of shots that help illustrate the glorious history of baseball, from an unknown photographer's depiction of the New York Baseball Club from 1855 on page 30 (the Society for American Baseball Research calls this the oldest known baseball photograph) to a tender embrace between Barry Bonds and his father, Bobby, in 2001 on page 623 -- and a whole lot in between.

It was in 1839 that Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and officials in France officially announced the invention of photography. Kamin-Oncea's remote could hardly have been envisioned by Daguerre when he was credited with inventing photography. Nor could today's lightning-fast shutter speeds, nearly instant global transmission, or digital photography.

Abner Doubleday is often credited with inventing baseball in Cooperstown, New York, that same year.

There's as much fiction as fact in the two events. Daguerre hardly was alone in the development of photography. And there is no evidence that Cooperstown was the birthplace of baseball or Doubleday its father.

But no matter their true origins, baseball and photography fit each other as snugly as ball and glove, and their marriage was destined from the start. They grew up together in the 1800s, matured through growing innovation and technology, and emerged as viable professions and hobbies.

At first, it hardly seemed likely that the two arts would cross. It not only took a while for photographers to turn their attention to something as "trivial" as baseball, but the earliest forms of photography could not capture the action of a pitcher in his windup or a player swinging a bat, let alone someone sliding into home.

But photography evolved quickly, with each new process helping to bring photography out of the portrait studio. In the 1860s, Matthew Brady and others brought graphic images of Civil War battlefields to the public.

In 1869, Brady shot a studio portrait of the Cincinnati Red Stockings (page 35), baseball's first professional team. Still, few photographers were willing to bring the camera out to the park. For one thing, cameras were still generally big and bulky and had to be lugged around the field, and shutter speeds were too slow for generating anything but posed pictures.

But then, a succession of events helped bring the camera to the park. In the late nineteenth century, Kodak's portable camera brought photography to the masses and stimulated interest again, and halftone plates made it feasible to put photographs in newspapers.

And in 1904, John B. Foster, the editor of Spalding's Official Baseball Guide, approached Charles M. Conlon, a proofreader from the New York Telegram. Foster knew that Conlon's hobby was taking pictures.

"Charley, they need pictures of ball players for the Guide," Foster said. "There is no reason you can't take pictures of players, as well as pictures of landscapes."

"No man ever did a bigger favor than John B. Foster did for me that morning in 1904," Conlon wrote in The Sporting News more than three decades later.

And no photographer ever did a bigger favor for baseball. Conlon shot baseball games and players until 1942. His prolific work, some of which you'll find in this book, appeared annually in the Spalding Guide, The Sporting News, the Telegram (eventually the World-Telegram), and on various trading cards and promotional materials.

With shots from Conlon and others appearing daily in the newspapers, photographers became more of a presence at the field. And the range of pictures they could take was almost unlimited because their movement was not restricted.

Except for between the lines, photographers could go just about anywhere, and sometimes positioned themselves just a few feet from the batter. Note the photo of Joe DiMaggio on the next page, a situation which would be unthinkable today.

"Don't I wish I could have worked on the field like that!" says Rich Pilling, Major League Baseball's director of photography.

"Imagine being down there when Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa belted a home run," veteran photographer Al Messerschmidt says.

Such photographer access in the early to mid-twentieth century meant some dramatic shots -- but it wasn't without its hazards, as well.

Conlon wrote that he had seen camermen get hurt badly, but he got hurt only once, when John Titus of the Philadelphia Phillies struck him with a line drive early in the photographer's career. "It still hurts," Conlon said more than a quarter century later.

As late as 1974, when Pilling first began shooting major-league games, photographers still were allowed to work from the warning track in foul territory in a few cities.

"I got hit by screaming foul balls, and quickly learned that you have to watch where the action is," Pilling says. "You couldn't watch the ball, you had to watch the players coming your way and know when you had to get out of the area."

Today's photographers generally are stationed near the dugouts and are less likely to get in harm's way. Still, what they gain in safety, they lose in creativity.

"In the past, you could pick the angle and fine-tune it," Pilling says, "as opposed to being situated in a camera well.

Of course, not even the camera well is totally safe.

Messerschmidt, a resident of Florida who shoots Marlins games and Grapefruit League spring training action for a number of teams, was in Oakland in the late 1980s when Athletics first baseman Mark McGwire came racing toward the camera well while chasing a foul pop.

Messerschmidt managed to elude the hulking McGwire, as well as the ball -- but his camera was not so lucky. The first baseman stopped near the railing of the well, but didn't reach in for the ball.

"It came straight down on the end of my lens hood, and put a great, big dent in it," Messerschmidt says.

Even as camera wells and restrictions have taken photographers further from the action in one sense, equipment changes have brought photographers even closer in another sense.

"From the days of the four-by-five-speed cameras looking over the umpire's shoulder, photographers have been pushed further and further from the action," Messerschmidt says. "But now we have longer and faster lenses and higher-speed motors."

Today's technology even gives the average fan in the stands the resources to shoot photographs which will make their memories last a lifetime.

"The auto-focus cameras make people photographers, and they make good photographers even better," Pilling says. "Still, the new cameras are just a tool. Photography is something you have to learn and work at. You can't just rely on technology."

While familiarity with equipment and the fundamentals of photography are essential to any baseball photographer, the refrain that comes up most is a knowledge of the game.

"Shooting baseball is more of a challenge than shooting other sports," Pilling says. "You really have to work at it to find the right shot. You have to anticipate the action."

To Messerschmidt, that means that, "if a situation calls for a potential squeeze or a double play and you don't know it, you might not be set up for it and you might miss it."

"Knowing the players helps, too," says Al Ainspan, the director of photography for Fleer Trading Cards. "A few years ago, we used a photograph of Jose Canseco making a snow-cone catch in the outfield." Canseco was not exactly known for stalwart defense, of course.

Trading cards have been a baseball staple for more than a century. Early photography on cards often included hokey attempts to simulate the game action that the technology of the era did not allow -- for example, placing a ball on a string in front of a batter or catcher.

Later, a photographer could shoot an entire team's worth of cards in one day before a game. But the hurried efforts did not produce realistic action, and sometimes resulted in errors or pranks, such as right-handed pitcher Lew Burdette posing as a southpaw in the 1950s, or the infamous expletive on the knob of Bill Ripken's bat in the 1980s.

Photo quality left something to be desired, too. Images were printed on the cardboard that came wrapped m waxy paper and accompanied by a rock-hard stick of gum. Today's cards feature excellent reproductions on high-quality paper. And with many players included in multiple sets, subsets, and insert cards, more and better photography is a necessity. Sammy Sosa, for instance, is a power hitter, but Ainspan will include photographs of him running the bases, sliding, or fielding.

"I also like to add interesting shots," Ainspan says. "Players signing autographs, laughing, smiling. I like to really bring out a player's personality."

For all photographers, that's always been easier with some players than with others.

Hall of Fame pitcher Rube Marquard once had Conlon hand over his photographic plate after the pitcher was photographed during warmups -- for fear that the photo would somehow give away some secret to opponents. Lefty Grove never would pose with the ball in his hand.

But most players were happy to oblige Conlon, as well as current photographers.

"Players like Cal Ripken and Derek Jeter are the nicest guys in the world," Messerschmidt says. "Pedro Martinez is a great guy, very funny."

One hot afternoon in Fenway Park, Messerschmidt caught Martinez on film clowning around in the dugout. Martinez disappeared for a few minutes, then came back with some bottles of water, one of which he handed to the sweltering picture taker.

Kamin-Oncea generally liked to take up her spot in the camera well on the third-base side of Dodger Stadium, next to the home-team dugout.

"Steve Garvey had a habit of wiping the pine tar on his bat in the corner of the dugout," she says. "He did at one night and I gave him a thumbs-up. He gave me a little wave back with his pinkie, then went out and hit home run. So every time I was there, he would scrape his bat in the corner and we'd exchange our signs. It was a good-luck thing."

Kamin-Oncea began shooting Dodgers games for the Los Angeles Times in her early twenties and would go out even on her off days. "I just really loved what I was doing," she says.

And that's another common denominator that separates the good baseball photographer from the rest: passion for the profession.

"That's true for any top photographer," says Pilling, who still shoots about 80 games a year. "It will reflect in your work. I put my entire body and soul into my photographs. They are an extension of me. That's a cliché, I know, but it's true. When I'm at an event, sure, I'm looking through a camera lens, but I'm not -- I'm part of the game."

Conlon, who died in 1945, never made his living from photography. "But the fun I have had, the days in the open, the associations, the friendships, the confidences I have enjoyed...well, you can't buy those things," he wrote.

Messerschmidt enjoys shooting the old stadiums such Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, but also likes to photograph college and minor-league baseball. "They're all bright-eyed and dreaming about making the big leagues," he says. "The odds are slim, but they're out there trying."

Pilling speaks for baseball photographers everywhere, as well as legions of fans who have enjoyed baseball from its inception.

"Baseball is played outside, in the sunshine. It's in the summer. I love photographing it."

From Baseball: A Celebration! By James Buckley, Jr. and Jim Gigliotti. © 2001 Jim Gigliotti. Used by permission.