In Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports, Clayton Trutor crafts a wide-ranging and meticulously researched history of the earliest professional sports franchises in the American South. Utilizing the rich scholarship on mid-twentieth-century Atlanta and a host of archival and newspaper sources, Trutor documents how civic leaders brought major league sport to the state of Georgia and why Atlantans responded with overwhelming apathy. The reasons for the city's “collective shrug” to major league sports are to be found in a host of economic, social, and cultural factors, and Trutor expertly weaves these forces together into a far-reaching and compelling narrative.
Loserville takes an expansive look at the history of Atlanta professional sports. Trutor begins the book with extensively researched chapters on Atlanta's political status quo, the national system of “franchise free agency” which made team relocations possible, and the bustling leisure culture that existed in the...
