![]() Mayer sat in the stands while his father told stories of playing little league against Pete Rose. He lived only 10 minutes from the stadium and watched the Big Red Machine dominate major league baseball. Mayer grew up in Cincinnati in the mid-'70s, making it difficult for a kid to ignore baseball, he says. When Daniel retired, he began work on one of his first projects, a Foxx biography. Richmonders in rowboats sat in the James River beyond the left-field fence, trying to retrieve the balls so the team could save money, Mayer says.Ĭo-author Daniel had always been a baseball fanatic, idolizing and imitating Jimmy Foxx, a right-handed first baseman of the 1930s. Mayer says the island ballpark created an atmosphere that resembled McCovey's Cove in San Francisco more than 100 years before spectators swam after Barry Bonds' blasts today. Through his daily readings of the paper, Mayer also explored the urban development of the city, as baseball diamonds were created and demolished from Broad Street to the Landmark Theatre, from the West End down to Mayo Island. "But baseball was such an active part of the fabric of life, it was often one of the lead stories, right on the front page." "Back then there was no sports section," Mayer says. ![]() Mayer spent a couple hundred hours navigating through microfilm, listening to the grating whirr of the machine while pages flashed by. His biggest resource was The Richmond Daily Dispatch, now known as The Richmond Times-Dispatch. Primary documents that outline the beginnings of baseball in the 1860s were scarce, Mayer says. His professor, fascinated with the national pastime, paired up with him to develop his thesis into a book. Chapters 2 through 5 of the book are pulled almost exactly from the work he did while he was advised by Daniel in graduate school. In writing the book, Mayer found a gold mine of material: his senior master's thesis in history from the University of Richmond. "I tried to incorporate some of the sociological aspects, cultural, historical and economic aspects, that tied Richmond and baseball together." "I tried to incorporate more than just baseball," Mayer says. ![]() In it, they document the chronology of all the city's amateur and professional teams since the game first arrived. Mayer, an associate director of admissions at the University of Richmond, has co-authored "Baseball and Richmond: A History of the Professional Game, 1884-2000," with retired UR professor W. Baseball had an impact on nearly everything. Religious groups strongly opposed Sunday games and beer sold at the ballpark.
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