Drawing on case records, this book details the legal and political battles and describes the roles of the judges, law enforcement officers and politicians, and the ordinary citizens who wanted enjoy baseball on Sunday. The contributions of unheralded civil rights pioneers - such as Joe Neet, John Powell and Lewis Perrine - are documented.

Table of ContentsPreface 1. William Drennan: The Sabbatarians' Poster Boy 2. Once Upon a Time… 3. Did Mighty Casey Strike Out on a Sunday? 4. Baseball and Blue Laws 5. Billy Sunday Turns Against Sunday 6. No Need to Feel Blue 7. Cheers for the Fans 8. Relax, You're with Friends—Sort Of 9. Play Ball—Or Not10. Religion and Sunday Baseball11. Secular vs. Religious12. Courts in Conflict13. "The law is a ass…"14. Sunday and the Law of Intended Consequences15. A Question of Geography16. Bad Attitude, Bad Outcome17. The Ministers vs. the Newspapers18. You Can Lead a Horse to Water, But You Can't Make It Go to Church19. Civil Disobedience Is Not Always a Bad Thing20. Clever Ruses21. Martyrs for the Cause22. The Murky "Cardinal" Rules of Baseball23. Buddy, Can You Spare Some Change?24. The State of Sunday Baseball25. Follow the Money26. Sunday Baseball and World War I27. Finally, a Breakthrough28. Starting Down a Slippery Slope29. The Volatile '30s30. There Was No Curfew to End World War II Early31. Between Wars—Again32. The 1950s33. The Last Great Sunday Battle34. Who Ultimately Decided the Sunday Laws Were Outdated?EpilogueAppendixChapter NotesBibliographyIndex

Sharp vividly depicts the profound struggle between ordinary citizens desiring to watch or play a Sunday ball game on their only day off in the once-standard six-day workweek and religious dogmatists seeking to control people's lives under the fig leaf of a state-mandated compulsory day of rest. Through extensive use of contemporaneous newspaper accounts, Sharp richly details the tensions of a civil-rights quarrel for individual choice to pursue secular activities on Sunday without governmental interference in numerous small cities with baseball teams at the amateur, semi-pro, and minor-league levels. This book is a fascinating exploration of the on-the-ground activities conducted over several decades with regard to restrictive laws prohibiting Sunday baseball, which adds significant color to the existing legislative and judicial accounts by historians that have focused largely on cities with major-league teams."—Charlie Bevis, author of Sunday Baseball: The Major Leagues' Struggle to Play Baseball on the Lord's Day, 1876-1934