Spalding's World Tour: The Audacious Adventure That Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made it America's Game - Tapa dura

Taking in travel, cities, politics, sex, race, deception - and baseball - the extraordinary story of Spalding's World Tour could well be titled "Around the World in Eighty Games". In October 1888, Albert Goodwill Spalding - baseball star, sporting-goods magnate, promotional genius, serial fabulist - departed Chicago on a trip that would take him and two baseball teams on a journey clear around the globe. Their mission, closely followed in the American and international press, had two (secret) goals: to fix the game in the American consciousness as the purest expression of the national spirit, and to seed markets for Spalding's products near and far. In the process, these first cultural ambassadors played before kings and queens, visited the Coliseum and the Eiffel Tower, and took pot shots with their baseballs at the great Sphinx in Egypt. In the UK, they travelled the length and breadth of the country, taking in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool and Belfast along the way. This expedition to lands both exotic and familiar, is chronicled with dash and wit in Mark Lamster's "Spalding's World Tour", a book filled with larger-than-life characters often competing harder for love and money off the baseball diamond than for runs on it. Getting themselves into scrapes and narrowly escaping international incident all around the globe, these innocents abroad gave the world an early peek at the American century just around the corner.

Mark Lamster has written about baseball and history in numerous publications, including the New York Times and New York Times Book Review. Lamster lives in New York City.