Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jas354
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Sports, Gender, and Society
ResumoThis account of the historic tour to Japan by a Babe Ruth–led team of American professional baseball players in 1934 is the first comprehensive study of that event. Robert K. Fitts, a passionate researcher of all things Japanese baseball (one might even call him a fitting successor to Robert Whiting, the dean of English-speaking authorities on Japan and Japanese baseball), has written an articulate history of an important event in baseball history. Fitts backgrounds the tour with the simmering political tensions within the Japanese body politic, as hotheaded super-nationalists edged the country toward authoritarianism and, eventually, war. The book's subtitle offers more than the study delivers. Banzai Babe Ruth is not steeped in a deep reading of Japanese history, nor does it employ an innovative methodology. The tour seen through the eyes of Japanese newspapermen, who play a major role in the book, would have been more interesting than Fitts's standard look at games, celebrities, and celebrations. The author connects the tour to devious and violent patriots, chronicles the exploits of supposed spy and baseball player Moe Berg (which is not a new story), and discusses imperial Japan's march into China, but insights are few (despite Fitts's rather gushing claim that he spoke with the historian John Dower). Until a scholar combines Japanese-language skills with research into U.S. archives outside of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and a few diaries, this story will lack new revelations. Fitts does not advance our knowledge beyond Robert Creamer's biography of Ruth (Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, 1974); articles on fascinating tidbits such as the life and career of the pitchers Victor Starrfin (a Russian who starred in Japan) and Eiji Sawamura (who struck out Ruth and Lou Gehrig and was later killed in battle in 1943), or Nicholas Dawidoff's rather sensationalist book on Berg, The Catcher Was a Spy (1994). Fitts's effort to link politics with sports points in the right direction, but readers should turn instead to Transpacific Field of Dreams (2012) by Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu, who scoops this book in terms of investigating Japanese baseball and its geopolitical context.
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