Northern Sandlots: A Social History of Maritime Baseball

Steven R. Hewitt teaches history at the University of Saskatchewan.

This vibrant and intellectual history of baseball in the Maritimes falls
somewhere between a traditional study of baseball featuring colorful
characters and lots of statistics and an academic inquiry into the
larger cultural/historical meaning of baseball to a particular region.

Three-quarters of the book deals with the pre–World War I period,
when, Howell argues, baseball clearly reflected the class, racial,
religious, gender, and ethnic divisions inherent in the broader society.
Many middle-class reformers who were involved in the Social Gospel
movement at the time viewed the game as one of many methods for
transforming society and its values. The last section of the book
explores the decline of this community-based game—a decline the author
believes resulted from the mass marketing of the major-league game in a
consumer-driven society. (Howell’s somewhat simplistic analysis of the
death of small-town baseball fails to address why local baseball enjoyed
renewed popularity in the United States during the 1980s while remaining
moribund in the Maritimes.)

Northern Sandlots is a refreshing alternative to the unenlightened
observations of sports writers or the inarticulate ramblings of
ex-athletes that constitute most mainstream baseball books.