Output details

The quality of home runs: the passion, politics, and language of Cuban baseball

The Quality of Home Runs won the Outstanding Book of the Year award at the 2009 annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS). This award is presented annually to the author(s) of “the best book published in the previous calendar year”. Books are nominated by third parties and the winning book is selected by a panel of 5 peers. NASSS is a professional organization for sociology researchers.

This book demanded a significant investment of time over ten years partly as a result of the multisite scope but also because of the need for formal approval from the American government, negotiations with Cuban authorities and assessment of the potential implications of publishing the material for the participants in the research. The extended effort involved in this research emanated from a multi-sited ethnography involving in-depth fieldwork in Cuba and six other countries located in Europe and the Americas along with the complexities of negotiating access to, and the publication of, material that was difficult to access and politically sensitive.