This review summarizes the book "New Mexico Baseball: Miners, Outlaws, Indians and Isotopes, 1880 to the Present" by L.M. Sutter. The book provides a history of baseball in New Mexico from the territorial period through statehood and modern times. It focuses on lower minor leagues and semipro circuits. Sutter uses newspapers and over 30 interviews to fill gaps from the lack of primary sources. The book highlights notable players and teams from different ethnic groups that contributed to New Mexico's unique multi-cultural baseball history. The review praises Sutter's concise overview of New Mexico history and insightful use of interviews to tell stories that illuminate the larger history of baseball in the state.

1. L. M. Sutter. New Mexico Baseball: Miners, Outlaws, Indians and Isotopes, 1880 to the Present. Jefferson:
McFarland, 2010. Illustrations. vii + 243 pp. $38.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7864-4122-8.
Reviewed by William E. Tydeman (Texas Tech University)
Published on H-NewMexico (March, 2011)
Commissioned by Tomas Jaehn
Ballgames: New Mexico’s Baseball
In June 2009, McFarland celebrated its thirtieth
anniversary and baseball aficionados had good reason
to celebrate. Within a large back list of thousands
of titles, McFarland has books in sports history and
baseball history that would be the envy of any major
publisher. McFarland finds writers and manuscripts
and smartly gears these publications to an identifiable
region or state. Often published as paperback origi-
nals, they are expensive. New Mexico Baseball pub-
lished in paperback this past year sells for a healthy
thirty-eight dollars.
The author L. M. Sutter is no stranger to either
these publishing objectives or baseball history. Sut-
ter, a member of the Society for American Baseball
Research (SABR), is the author of Ball, Bat and Bi-
tumen: A History of Coalfield Baseball in the Ap-
palachian South (2009), also published by McFarland
and winner of a Sporting News Research Award in
2009. (The two other winners for that year were pub-
lished by McFarland as well.) Although Sutter lives
in southwest Virginia, she has spent considerable time
in New Mexico and understands the unique qualities
of New Mexico life and history. She very artfully uses
her knowledge of New Mexico to introduce readers to
the relevant New Mexico history that coincides with
the topic or subject under discussion. In fact, her first
chapter of New Mexico Baseball is as good a succinct
overview of the main historical and cultural configu-
rations of the Land of Enchantment as one can find.
Early chapters treat baseball in the territorial period
from the 1880s to statehood and baseball in the min-
ing camps. She tags on a discussion of baseball in
Clovis followed by chapters that provide summaries
of penitentiary teams and Kirtland Air Force Base
baseball activities.
Her final chapters are the best in the book. Sutter
extends the coverage to African American teams and,
in addition, covers the legendary Roswell Rocket, Joe
Bauman, who hit seventy-one home runs in the 1954
season (a record for professional baseball that stood
until Barry Bonds blasted seventy-three in 2001 dur-
ing the steroid era). Chapter 10, “The Rio Abajo,”
is devoted to Hispanos in baseball while the final
chapter, by far the longest, treats the history of Na-
tive American involvement in the national pastime.
Another chapter highlights the town of Farmington
and the Connie Mack World Series. This work offers
a big chunk of baseball history but Sutter manages
concision by dealing only with the state’s lower mi-
nor leagues and semipro circuits. The Albuquerque
teams, the Dukes, and the Isotopes, for example, get
little mention. The same is true for the college game.
If organized women’s baseball was played, it goes un-
mentioned as well.
Within these confines Sutter makes a valuable
contribution. She demonstrates that in New Mex-
ico, as elsewhere, baseball mirrors the larger configu-
rations of American culture. She does not set out to
chronicle many topics that preoccupy the current gen-
eration of sports historians. Labor relations and eco-
nomics, class identities, sport as shaped by industrial
capitalism, machine politics, and the way tradition
and nostalgia play out in sport to promote a national
identity are not part of the author’s objective. In-
stead, we have a well-written narrative of a neglected
aspect of the New Mexico past. More than a chroni-
cle, eschewing theory, the book is filled with interest-
ing facts. In New Mexico Baseball, we are again ex-
posed to the exceptionalism of the state’s cultural mi-
lieu. Here, however, we find that triculturalism seems
to have a basis in fact. As Sutter puts it, “the New
Mexico baseball stories, by necessity, have to be told
against the backdrop of the states many cultures–
Native American, Hispanic American, African Amer-
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2. H-Net Reviews
ican and Anglo-American and the way they have
intertwined to create a uniquely complex populace.
While race sometimes affected play in the state, it
was more often disregarded (sometimes to a revolu-
tionary degree) and leagues–even individual teams–
could be represented by multiple groups. Throughout
the decades in which the face of the national pastime
was unnervingly waspish, the teams and leagues of
New Mexico were often multi-colored, multi-cultural
and even multi-lingual”(p. 1). This insight, well doc-
umented by Sutter, is enough to make New Mexico
Baseball a worthwhile addition to a growing list of
first-rate studies on New Mexico.
One of the other challenges Sutter confronts is the
general limitation of sources and evidence, especially
in the territorial and early statehood eras. It remains
true that minor league and semipro baseball are some
of the most understudied aspects of baseball history
and American sport. A good part of this is due to
the lack of primary sources at the local and regional
levels. The principal sources remain newspapers and
interviews with surviving ex-players and fans from
the 1940s and 1950s. Sutter uses these sources to the
fullest. She appears to have consulted all the available
newspaper accounts and conducted over thirty inter-
views. Moreover Sutter’s ear for the telling phrase
skillfully extracts interesting details from the inter-
views. Often she allows the interviewees to tell sto-
ries of their life in baseball that illuminate the larger
history of the New Mexico leagues and teams.
Some of the stories are real doozies. An inter-
esting parade of characters marches across the gen-
erations. They serve to remind us that in an earlier
era, baseball was wild and wooly. Her accounts of
such figures as Joe Albeita, Bauman, Zeak Williams,
Grover Seitz, and Pablo Albeita are entertaining and
informative. The book also includes a fine selec-
tion of photographs reproduced from snapshot al-
bums and archival collections. An array of portraits
and photographs by Belinda Winn adds interest. Sut-
ter wisely steers clear of overreliance on statistics,
but is up to date enough to include citations to Web
pages.
In utilizing the available materials on the lower
minor leagues, Sutter draws our attention to a ne-
glected, hidden history of baseball in New Mexico.
Her study may also serve to remind us of how much
more there is to be done. Other historians may follow,
prepared to cast the stories of the local communities
into a larger framework of the changing face of sport
in American life. As this work goes forward, New
Mexico Baseball will serve as an essential reference
point.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: William E. Tydeman. Review of Sutter, L. M., New Mexico Baseball: Miners, Outlaws, Indians
and Isotopes, 1880 to the Present. H-NewMexico, H-Net Reviews. March, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30571
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-
No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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