This Sunday, April 1, is opening day for the 2007 season of Major League Baseball. Yale University Press has recently released two books on America’s favorite pastime – Bart Giamatti: A Profile, by Robert P. Moncreiff, and Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball, by Alan M. Klein.

Moncreiff’s portrait of Giamatti, the former president of Yale as well as commissioner of baseball, focuses on his years at the university (1966-1986) and his brief tenure as a major league baseball executive (1986-1989), in which he oversaw the expulsion of Cincinnati’s Pete Rose from the sport for gambling.

As baseball becomes increasingly international, major league rosters include players from at least fourteen countries, and more than 25% of all players are foreign born. In “Growing the Game,” Klein offers the first in-depth look at a sport in the process of globalizing, which he attributes to decreasing opportunities in the United States as well as to promise abroad from countries such as South Africa, Japan, and the Dominican Republic.