Alou, Felipe, and Peter Kerasotis. Alou: My Baseball Journey. Forward by Pedro Martinez. Pp 336, 35 photographs, 1 illustration, and 1 index. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. $29.95 hardcover. A few years ago, a popular brand of beer (associated with one of the Major League clubs) ran a commercial that demonstrated the dramatic demographic…
Babicz, Martin C. and Thomas W. Zeiler, National Pastime: U.S. History through Baseball (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2017). Reviewed by Jorge Iber Martin Babicz and Thomas Zeiler’s National Pastime: U.S. History through Baseball seeks to present readers with a single tome that uses the sport as a mechanism with which to examine and clarify…
By Jorge E. Moraga Introduction: Your 2016 Baseball Hall of Famers… On July 27th, retired Major League Baseball (MLB) players George Kenneth “Ken” “Junior” “The Kid” Griffey Jr. and Michael Joseph “Mike” Piazza joined the ranks of baseball’s most elite club. In a near unanimous decision, the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) voted in…
by Jorge Iber, PhD Texas Tech University In a previous blog, I discussed the story of E.C. Lerma, one of the first Mexican American high school football (and basketball and track) coaches in the history of the state of Texas. His career during the late 1930s though the middle of the 1960s provided coaches, teachers,…
By Jorge Iber, PhD Texas Tech University In my first two posts for this blog, the intention was to introduce the readers to the significance of the role of Latinos/as in US sports history, and then, to provide but one example of an individual whose life and career (Coach E.C. Lerma from Duval County, Texas)…
By: Jorge Iber, PhD Texas Tech University In my first post, I provided an argument for the inclusion of Mexican Americans (and other Latinos/as) within the broader framework of the history of US sports. In that essay, I focused on the story of the only team from the Rio Grande Valley to ever win a…
Sport in American History 