Baseball on Cape Cod (MA)

by Dan Crowley

From the first organized game in 1865 on the fields owned by sea captain Edward Nichols along School Street in Sandwich, the game of baseball has prospered among the dunes and beaches of Cape Cod. Today, it is home to the country's premier collegiate summer league. Located in one of the most beautiful spots on the East Coast, Cape Cod has always attracted visitors in the summer, and along with sunshine and salty air, baseball has been there for more than one hundred years. The Cape Cod Baseball League is now a steppingstone to the major leagues, with some former players enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Baseball on Cape Cod chronicles through pictures the rich heritage and tradition of the game from its earliest organized beginnings to today's high-profile players. Every summer, fans from across the country flock to the Cape for some of the finest amateur baseball in the nation.

Genres: Baseball, Sports

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2004

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Don LaFountaine]

This is a quick reading, mainly pictorial book about the history of baseball on Cape Cod from 1865 to 2004. It is an interesting account of how baseball started to be played in the 19th Century, and how the game grew to accommodate a number of teams. It is one of the oldest baseball systems in the country, and with the exception of the years during World War II, there has been continuous summer baseball. Consisting of mainly college kids and those trying to make the professional leagues and have not been able to catch on, Cape Cod baseball for a while after the war would not allow anyone not a "Cape Cod-er" to play in the league. Eventually that changed and the game is going strong there. (At least up to 2004 when the book is written.)

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves baseball, especially if they are from Cape Cod. There are some interesting pictures throughout the pages of the book and some are even of those who made it all the way to the Majors.

[Cheryl]

I picked this book without really looking into it. The reading challenge had a book about or involving a sport. I'm really not a sport person. In spite of not being sport centric, I do like catching Cape Cod league baseball games when we go on vacation.

What I'd hoped this book would be, was a great book about the history of the league. While this had some of that, it wasn't at all what I was expecting. It was more like a scrapbook. There were captured pictures and I did learn a little bit, but mostly it was a lot of names (most of which mean nothing to me) and a fair amount of repeated information.

The author mentions another book that he relied on and I've got that on my to read list now, but this was a disappointing read.