Baseball

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Baseball

Originally an early nineteenth century variation of a venerable English game, baseball, by the late twentieth century, had developed into America's "national pastime," a game so indelibly entwined with American culture and society that diplomat Jacques Barzun once remarked, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."

Baseball lore places the origins of baseball in Cooperstown, a small town in upstate New York, where Abner Doubleday, a West Point cadet and Civil War hero, allegedly invented the bat-and-ball game in 1839. In reality, the sport was neither new nor indigenous. The game that ultimately developed into modern baseball was in fact a modified version of rounders, an English sport imported to the colonies prior to the American Revolution. Early forms of baseball were remarkably similar to rounders. Both games involved contending teams equipped with a ball as well as a bat with which to hit the ball. In addition, both baseball and rounders required the use of a level playing field with stations or bases to which the players advanced in their attempts to score.

Baseball quickly evolved from the sandlot play of children to the organized sport of adults. In 1845, a group of clerks, storekeepers, brokers, and assorted gentlemen of New York City, under the direction of bank clerk Alexander Joy Cartwright, founded the first baseball club in the United States—the New York Knickerbockers, which played its games at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The club was more a social association than an athletic one, providing opportunities to play baseball, as well as hosting suppers, formal balls, and other festivities. Individuals could become members only through election. By the 1850s, a number of clubs patterned on the Knickerbocker model appeared throughout the Northeast and in some areas of the Midwest and Far West.

The need for codified orderly play had prompted clubs such as the Knickerbockers to draft rules for the fledgling sport. In 1857, a National Association of Baseball Players formed to unite the disparate styles of play throughout the country into a universal code of rules. Initially, the National Association attracted only New York clubs, and so the popular "Knickerbocker" style of baseball predominated. This version of the sport represented a decided evolution from rounders and resembled modern baseball in form. While no umpire as yet called balls or strikes in the Knickerbocker game, a batter was retired when he swung at and missed three pitches. The Knickerbocker rules limited a team at-bat to only three outs, and replaced "plugging," a painful practice by which a fielder could retire a base runner by hitting him with a thrown ball, with "tagging," simply touching a base runner with the ball. Within four years of its founding, the National Association came to include clubs in New Haven, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. These clubs, for the most part, renounced their local variations on the sport and took up the "Knickerbocker" style of play.

After the Civil War, the "fraternal" club game took a decidedly commercial turn. Rather than relying exclusively on club membership to finance their teams, clubs began to earn money by charging admission to games. In order to maximize gate fees, clubs inclined away from friendly games played among club members, and turned more and more to external contests against clubs in other regions. At the same time, to guarantee fan interest, clubs felt increasing pressure to field the most highly skilled players. They began to recruit members based on talent, and, for the first time, offered financial remuneration to prospective players. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings fielded an entire team of salaried players—the first professional baseball squad in American history.

As more clubs turned professional, a league structure emerged to organize competition. In 1871, ten teams formed the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, a loose confederation designed to provide a system for naming a national championship team. The National League, formed five years later, superseded this alliance, offering a circuit comprised of premier clubs based in Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Louisville. A host of competing leagues arose, among them the International League and the Northwestern League, but it was not until 1903 that the National League recognized the eight-team American League as its equal. Beginning that year, the two leagues concluded their schedules with the World Series, a post-season playoff between the two leagues.

Despite the game's increased commercialization, baseball, in the early years of the twentieth century, developed into the American national game. Players such as Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson as well as managers like Connie Mack and John McGraw approached the game in a scientific manner, utilizing various strategies and tactics to win ball games; in the process, they brought to the game a maturity and complexity that increased the sport's drama. The construction of great ballparks of concrete and steel and the game's continuing power to bind communities and neighborhoods together behind their team further solidified the coming of age of professional baseball. Baseball had achieved a new institutional prominence in American life. Boys grew up reading baseball fiction and dreaming of becoming diamond heroes themselves one day. The World Series itself became a sort of national holiday, and United States chief executives, beginning with William Howard Taft in 1910, ritualized the commencement of each new season with the ceremonial throwing of the first ball.

The appeal of the game had much to do with what many considered its uniquely American origins. "It's our game—that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game," exclaimed poet Walt Whitman. Baseball, he wrote, "has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life." To preserve this patriotic image, baseball administrators such as Albert Spalding and A.G. Mills vehemently dismissed any claims that baseball had evolved from rounders. In 1905, Mills headed a commission to investigate the origins of baseball. The group found that baseball was uniquely American and bore no traceable connection with rounders, "or any other foreign sport." Mills traced the game's genesis to Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown—a sketchy claim, to be sure, as Mills' only evidence rested on the recollections of a boyhood friend of Doubleday who ended his days in an institution for the criminally insane. Still, Doubleday was a war hero and a man of impeccable character, and so the commission canonized the late New Yorker as the founder of baseball, later consecrating ground in his native Cooperstown for the purpose of establishing the sport's Hall of Fame.

Baseball's revered image took a severe hit in 1920, when eight Chicago White Sox were found to have conspired with gamblers in fixing the 1919 World Series. The incident horrified fans of the sport and created distrust and disappointment with the behavior of ballplayers idolized throughout the nation. A young boy, perched outside the courtroom where the players' case was heard, summed up the feelings of a nation when he approached "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, one of the accused players, and said tearfully, "Say it ain't so, Joe." The eight players were later banned from the sport by baseball commissioner Kenesaw "Mountain" Landis, but the damage to the sport's reputation had already been done.

Baseball successfully weathered the storm created by the "Black Sox" scandal, as it came to be known, thanks in large part to the emergence of a new hero who brought the public focus back to the playing field, capturing the American imagination and generating excitement of mythic proportions. In the 1920s, George Herman "Babe" Ruth—aptly nicknames the "Sultan of Swat"—established himself as the colossal demigod of sports. With his landmark home runs and charismatic personality, Ruth triggered a renewed interest in baseball. While playing for the New York Yankees, Ruth established single-season as well as career records for home runs. Ruth's extravagant lifestyle and Paul Bunyan-like appearance made him a national curiosity, while his flair for drama, which included promising and delivering home runs for sick children in hospitals, elevated him to heroic proportions in the public eye. In mythologizing the sport, Ruth restored and even escalated the sanctity of the "national pastime" that had been diminished by the "Black Sox" scandal. Along with Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson, Ruth gained immortality as a charter member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, opened in 1939.

By the 1940s, the heroes of the game came to represent an even more diverse body of the population. Substantial numbers of Italians, Poles, and Jews inhabited major league rosters, and a host of these Eastern Europeans became some of the game's biggest stars. Hank Greenberg and Joe DiMaggio, among many other children of immigrants, became national celebrities for their on-field exploits. In this respect, baseball served an important socializing function. As the Sporting News boasted, "The Mick, the Sheeney, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap, or so the so-called Anglo-Saxon—his nationality is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, or hit, or field." During World War II, when teams were depleted by the war effort, even women became part of baseball history, as female leagues were established to satisfy the public's hunger for the sport. Still, the baseball-as-melting-pot image had one glaring omission. A "gentleman's agreement" dating back to the National Association excluded African Americans from playing alongside whites in professional baseball. Various so-called Negro Leagues had formed in the early twentieth century to satisfy the longings of African Americans to play the game, and a number of players such as Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige posted accomplishments that rivaled those of white major leaguers. Still, for all their talent, these players remained barred from major league baseball. In 1947, Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Brach Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a major league contract, ostensibly to end segregation in baseball but also to capitalize on a burgeoning African American population newly migrated to the cities of the North. When Robinson played, blacks across the nation were glued to their radios, cheering him on as a symbol of their own hopes. Robinson was immensely unpopular with many white fans and players, but his performance on the field convinced other clubs of the correctness of Rickey's decision, and, by 1959, every team in baseball had been integrated.

The popularity of baseball reached an all-time high in the 1950s. A new generation of stars, among them Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Willie Mays, joined Babe Ruth in the pantheon of American greats. Teams such as the Brooklyn Dodgers, affectionately known as "Dem Bums," won their way into the hearts of baseball fans with their play as well as with indelible personalities such as "Pee Wee" Reese, "Preacher" Roe, and Duke Snider. Baseball cards, small collectible photographs with player statistics on their flip sides, became a full-fledged industry, with companies such as Topps and Bowman capitalizing on boyhood idolatry of their favorite players. And Yogi Berra, catcher for the New York Yankees, single-handedly expanded baseball's already-sizable contribution to American speech with such head-scratching baseball idioms as "It ain't over 'til it's over." By the end of the twentieth century, Berra's witticisms had come to occupy an indelible place in the American lexicon.

The 1950s witnessed baseball at the height of its popularity and influence in American culture, but the decade also represented the end of an era in a sport relatively unchanged since its early days. Continuing financial success, buoyed especially by rising income from television and radio rights, led to club movement and league expansion. In 1953, the Boston Braves transferred its franchise to Milwaukee, and, five years, later, the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers moved to California, becoming the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, respectively. Later, new franchises would emerge in Houston and Montreal. The location of the ballparks in areas geared toward suburban audiences destroyed many urban community ties to baseball forged over the course of a century.

Players also gained unprecedented power in the latter half of the twentieth century and, with it, astronomical salaries that did much to dampen public enthusiasm for their heroes. In 1976, pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally challenged the long-established reserve clause, which owners had, for more than a century, used to bind players to teams for the duration of their careers. Arbiter Peter Seitz effectively demolished the clause, ushering in the era of free agency. For the first time in baseball history, players could peddle their wares on the open market, and, as a result, salaries skyrocketed. In 1976, the Boston Red Sox made history by signing Bill Campbell, baseball's first free agent, to a four-year, $1 million dollar contract. The average annual salary rose from $41,000 in 1974 to $1,000,000 in 1992. In 1998, pitcher Kevin Brown signed the first $100 million contract in sport history, averaging over $13 million per annum. Free agency, by encouraging the constant movement of players from team to team, also did much to sever the long-term identification of players with particular teams and cities, thus further weakening community bonds with baseball.

Polls consistently revealed that fans resented the overpayment of players, but still they continued to attend big-league games en masse. Major league attendance records were broken six times in the 1985 through 1991 seasons. The players' strike of 1994 dramatically reversed this tide of goodwill. The players' rejection of a salary cap proposed by owners resulted in a 234-day labor stoppage during the 1994 season, with the cancellation of 921 regular-season games as well as the World Series. The strike, which ended early in the 1995 season, disrupted state and city economies and disappointed millions of fans. As a result, the 1995 season saw an unprecedented decline in attendance. The concurrent rise of basketball as a major spectator sport in the late 1990s also damaged the drawing power of baseball.

Stellar team performances as well as a number of stunning individual achievements in the latter half of the 1990s brought fans back to ballparks across the country in record numbers. The Atlanta Braves, with their remarkable seven divisional titles in the decade, reminded many of the glory days of baseball, when the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals registered the word "dynasty" in the sport's lexicon. Similarly, the Yankees delivered one of the finest performances by a team in baseball history, logging 114 victories in 1998 and winning the World Series handily. On the players' end, Cal Ripken Jr., in eclipsing Lou Gehrig's mark of 2,130 consecutive games played, brought important positive press to baseball in the wake of its 1994 players' strike. Ripken's fortitude and passion for the game was a welcome relief to fans disillusioned by the image of selfish players concerned primarily with monetary returns. Similarly, Baltimore's Mark McGwire returned the focus of fans to the playing field with his assault on Roger Maris' single-season mark for home runs in 1998. McGwire's record-setting 70 round-trippers that season captured the nation's attention in a Ruth-ian fashion and did much to restore the mythos and romance of the sport, much as the Sultan of Swat's accomplishments had done in the 1920s.

Though professional baseball has had its moments of honor and of ignominy, perhaps the real legacy of the glory days of baseball is still to be found on community playing fields. Baseball is not only beloved as a spectator sport, but is still often the first team game played by both sexes in peewee and little leagues. While modern mothers may shudder to imagine their children imitating the tobacco-chewing ballplayers they see on television, there is an undeniable thrill at the little leaguer's first home run that harks back to the most truly electrifying quality of baseball—that moment when skill meets desire, enabling the ordinary person to perform magnificent feats.

—Scott Tribble