This is the second of two posts on Baseball’s Unwritten Rules. The “unwritten rules” entail issues of masculinity and decorum. They’re often contradictory and at times fans, players, and former players in sports media disagree on what they really are. In this series we want to take a closer look at them and try to…
Here in the US Midwest (Iowa to be exact) full-fledged summer is now less than one week away. Okay, so most folks would probably say it already is summer. The kids are out of school, pools are open, farmer’s markets and arts festivals are packed with leisurely loungers, and it has already hit 90 degrees.…
American Football has never been more popular among U.S. sports fans. One might argue that the nation’s obsession with the sport borders on addiction. Fans follow the fortunes of their teams year round (and round the clock). NBC’s Sunday Night Football is the most-watched television program in the country. And with the help of carefully…
Two months ago, I was immersed in studying for comprehensive exams. One of my major fields is the scholarship on sport and media. Broadly speaking, I’ve tried to get a sense of the literature both in terms of media institutions and structure as well as cultural representation. I aligned my readings to freshen up on…
This post represents a thought experiment (with more questions than answers) about some of the challenges that scholars researching sport and sport media face regarding the ways in which we conceptualize and theorize our topics. Of course, concepts and theories inform methods, so this is a reflection on our choices about methods as well. I…
This time of year, it’s not entirely uncommon for sports journalists to comment upon the remarkable quantity of non-US born baseball players stealing the show in Major League Baseball’s (MLB) postseason. Other times the coverage is less laudatory. Two on-field conflicts erupted in late September of 2013 involving a Dominican player (Carlos Gomez and Jose Fernandez,…
