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The 1922 Supreme Court anti-trust exemption awarded to organized baseball was quick to grasp the prerogatives of the emerging U.S. popular culture industries, and displays the anomalies of performance in the law. The trade and commerce in cultural performances yield contradictory opinions about the distinctions between the functions of work and play, as well as the properties of work and the performing arts. The interconnecting functions of a sport like organized baseball, as an industry, an art, and a popular cultural entertainment makes baseball a rich object for analysis in the perplexing historical puzzle of decentralized U.S. cultural policy.

In this study we examine how resource-constrained organizations can maneuver for competitive advantage in highly institutionalized fields. Unlike studies of institutional entrepreneurship, we investigate competitive maneuvering by an organization that is unable to alter either the regulative or normative institutions that characterize its field. Using the “Moneyball” phenomenon and recent changes in Major League Baseball as the basis for an intensive case study of entrepreneurial actions taken by the Oakland A’s, we found that the A’s were able to maneuver for advantage by using bricolage and refusing to enact baseball’s cognitive institutions, and that they continued succeeding despite ongoing resource constraints and rapid copying of their actions by other teams. These results contribute to our understanding of competitive maneuvering and change in institutionalized fields. Our findings expand the positioning of bricolage beyond its prior characterization as a tool used primarily by peripheral organizations in less institutionalized fields; our study suggests that bricolage may aid resource constrained participants (including the majority of entrepreneurial firms) to survive in a wider range of circumstances than previously believed.

When and how did modern rankings emerge? This paper aims to answer that question by taking a closer look at the history of American baseball. In the 1870s, baseball was the first team sport to introduce a competitive system, the league, that determined the champion based on teams’ overall number of wins and losses. The in-depth analysis of the baseball discourse from the 1850s to the 1870s shows that leagues were introduced as a solution to a specific problem: how to identify deserving champions that had proved their ability again and again over the course of a season. The rising awareness of this problem was due to a shift in the baseball discourse of the 1860s, which established a new, statistical understanding of athletic achievement that demanded consistency of performance together with an acceptance that even champions lose a game once in a while. Rankings and other statistics, based on constant scoring of individual plays and increasingly sophisticated methods, helped institutionalize this new understanding of achievement and, in so doing, made the introduction of the league system possible. Moreover, the league system proved to be dependent on rankings – in the form of league tables – that made it possible to observe and experience the championship race, making rankings an essential element of modern competitive sports. Given that today’s rankings apply similar ideas of achievement to other fields (e.g., the “excellence” of universities), the story draws attention to the history of a specific imaginary of achievement that transcends the field of sports and should be studied more widely to understand the institutionalization of rankings in other fields.

This chapter analyzes the aggregate performance of Home Run Derby competitors’ performance both before and after the Home Run Derby for the time period 1999–2013. Regression to the mean suggests that in general, those players with outstanding performances in the first half of the season will regress to the mean. The findings here are consistent with regression to the mean, and the mean performance along four key analytics is statistically significantly worse for the competitors. However, the winners’ mean performance both before and after the Home Run Derby are not statistically significantly different. Thus, the results are consistent with previous research, but the results also find so-called “winner and loser” effects in Major League Baseball.

This paper describes the home run as a dramatic offensive accomplishment in baseball linked to the five dramaturgical dimensions (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) defined by Burke. Such an accomplishment also pertains to two types of social pasts – categorical and crystallized – that can serve as correlates to the five dramaturgical dimensions. Owing to its dramaturgical and temporal significance, the home run symbolizes a celebrated sign of prowess that contributes to a home run hitter's or slugger's rarified status. Further, as a dramaturgical moment, the home run calls forth specified responses (especially on the part of announcers) that contribute to its distinctive meaning in the game.

To highlight and explain some characteristics of sport which can contribute to HIV/AIDS awareness as a part of comprehensive HIV/AIDS countermeasures. HIV/AIDS is among the most crucial of global issues, and sport is widely viewed as a possible vehicle to counter it. By using data from a Zimbabwe study, the chapter draws on several unique characteristics of sport which can help in combating challenging social problems.

Several characteristics of “awareness activities” in Zimbabwean baseball were observed. Some points are characteristics of sport itself, some are related specifically to baseball, and the others are, we can say, peculiar to the activities of the Zimbabwe Baseball Association (ZBA) and the Maxwell and Friends Foundation (MFF). As an awareness catalyst, sport has some unique characteristics, although we cannot say that promoting HIV/AIDS awareness through sport can always be effective for all fields. However, the worldwide increase in such activities shows certain advantages of using sport as an awareness tool.

This chapter shows some unique characteristics of sport in the field of HIV/AIDS awareness. It will contribute to the re-examination of sport from the perspective of Sport for Development and Peace (SDP).

Learner-centered interactions determine the look and feel of online courses, influencing the way learners experience them. In this chapter we investigate considerations related to three types of interactions: learner–content, learner–instructor, and learner–learner. Learners interact with content through the course structure and layout. They also interact with peers who may be cast in the role of community members, there to provide social support, or they may be more prominently cast as information providers and/or collaborators. The learner is at the center of both content and peer interactions. Instructor interactions set expectations for learners and facilitate learner interactions with content and peers. Instructors are instrumental forces in bringing about connections between learners, enabling the social presence necessary for collaboration. Instructor interaction may also be relational, enabling individualized connections between learners and the instructor. Redesign decisions center on creating a course structure that fits the learner and content and results in a satisfying course experience. We use the power of metaphor to bring into focus the most relevant considerations. In the end, we illustrate the redesign of a single course through the lens of three separate metaphors to demonstrate how metaphor shapes the process, bringing together design and interaction decisions to create unique and elegant course designs.