Folklorist Tristram P. Coffin looks at the game through superstition, ritual, tall tale, gossip, mythmaking and anything that accumulates when people really, really commit to a game.

Lucky socks, cursed bats, dugout habits, repeated gestures and one-liner warnings sit alongside the larger mythology of heroes, villains and “historic” games whose importance often evaporates almost immediately after they end.

The charm is how baseball converts repetition into tradition and journalism into folklore. Chapters move through baseball speech, superstition, Babe Ruth, regional and class identity, commercialisation, then into a cultural history with a dry anthropological streak. All in all, a wonderful study of how spectators and players turn a game into a shared symbolic world, and how that world then begins to look natural.

First edition. Herder and Herder, New York, 1971. Hardcover. Light general shelf wear; internally clean and well preserved.