FIELD OF DREAMS, FIELD OF GREEN: THE HISTORY BEHIND MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL’S USE OF ITS IMAGE AS ‘AMERICA’S PASTIME’ TO MASK ANTICOMPETITIVE BUSINESS PRACTICES

“Field of Dreams, Field of Green” explores the evolution of baseball from its beginnings as a fraternal and club sport to its transformation into a multi-billion-dollar business. In doing so, this dissertation uses baseball as a lens to provide meaningful insight into the development of American economic, cultural, and social life from the 1850s to the 1970s. Central to baseball’s growth as a business was the branding of the game as “America’s pastime,” and so this dissertation also builds on the notion that public relations and advertising were among the most important ways that businesses, industries, and even the development of modern American capitalism were legitimized. As an institutional history, “Field of Dreams, Field of Green” engages with some of the following questions: Why did professional baseball develop as a business in the way that it did? What were the preconditions for that growth? How were the emotions, politics, symbols, or new technology of a given time used or reacted to in building and branding Major League Baseball (MLB) as a product? What key moments, and people, were most formative and how did the marketing, managerial, and entrepreneurial approaches change with the shifting economic, political, and social environments? In answering these questions, this dissertation builds from a framework created by the ideas of Alfred Chandler, Richard Tedlow, Roland Marchand, and others. Their groundwork is paired with a broad collection of archival documents and newspapers to build a narrative that offers new ways of thinking about how professional baseball developed from the post-Civil War era, the impact sport has in understanding and constructing national identity, and the role culture has on American economic history. In the end, this dissertation finds that a successful corporate enterprise can be driven by the impact of key leaders at key moments who understand how to embrace and react to change. As MLB matured it became inward looking and lacking in innovation. Only surviving with the benefits of court protected labor control, insulation from antitrust laws, and first mover size advantage to protect it, MLB’s developmental history supports a belief in strong, competitive, but regulated, markets