America's National Game is a book by Albert Spalding, published in 1911 detailing the early history of the sport of baseball. Much of the story is told first-hand, since Spalding had been involved in the game, first as a player and later an administrator, since the 1850s. In addition to his personal recollections, he had access to the records of Henry Chadwick, the game's first statistician and archivist. Spalding was, however, known to aggrandise his role in the major moments in baseball's history.
Famous quotes containing the words america, national and/or game:
“When I think of him, and his six sons, and his son-in-law, not to enumerate the others, enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for months if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and wintering the thought, without expecting any reward but a good conscience, while almost all America stood ranked on the other side,—I say again that it affects me as a sublime spectacle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)