At Large

It was in the middle of yet another winter storm. The “New England Cocktail” was in full view – snow, sleet, and freezing rain well stirred with a gusting wind of 40 mph pushing against the windows. The age-old quandary of “shovel now or shovel later” was temporarily displaced by another cup of coffee and a stint at the computer. News headlines first, we braced for more contentious news and the daily shaking of the head while muttering things that would make a sailor blush. But, then …

Spring training starts with pitchers and catchers reporting to camp.

Baseball? At this time of year? Have they no sense of what winter entails for those of us in the frozen north? That’s the wind howling, not the sound of a 100 mph fastball whizzing past an unsuspecting batter.

Full team workouts begin Monday. 

By this time, the allure of stumbling down the Internet rabbit hole to become immersed in all things baseball was too much of a temptation to resist. Although never a rabid fan (aside from a boyhood fascination with Larry Doby of the then Cleveland Indians), to have a winter diversion was quite attractive.  

Suddenly, with a single click, Major League Baseball invited us all to the four game “Tokyo Series” bringing the Cubs and Dodgers to the Tokyo Dome to take on the Hanshin Tigers and the Yomiuri Giants. The games were in mid-March and tickets made available to US fans … were already sold out.

We moved on to Opening Day, that festival of skipping work and school to hope for good weather and a parking place punctuated with a hot dog and a beer. March 27. By the time this edition emerges online and in the quickly disappearing stacks at your local market, that’s history and we’re already in a season that will not end until late September.

Why is baseball such a bellwether for so many Americans? Why has the infection begun so many years ago spread like an epidemic through Caribbean Islands, South American countries, Korea, Japan, and beyond? “America’s pastime” has been embraced on a much grander stage. Certainly, soccer commands a larger international audience, but with a season that stretches from late March through the “World Series” in this country, with games spread globally via satellite, nine players trying to hit a tightly wound ball with a wooden bat and run 90 foot paths to touch four bases has garnered a huge audience.

So how did all this begin?

We clicked through, hoping to be enlightened as we tumbled further into the endless chasm of information, conflicting opinions, and history, all the while letting the coffee grow cold and the storm continue to rage outside. We were learning about baseball. The shoveling would simply have to wait.

Rounders, stoolball, and cricket

Various conflicting sources (always a bad sign) have determined that baseball is a game that had its roots in the 13th century. It was pictured in the collection of illustrated Galician-Portuguese poems, Cantigas de Santa Maria. As “stoolball” or “rounders,” the game was apparently played at various venues in continental Europe and England. In 1477, King Edward IV made the playing of rounders, stoolball, and cricket illegal, pointing to archery as the only acceptable game for the masses.

Plymouth Colony’s Governor William Bradford, with his usual sense of Puritan humor, decried playing the game on Christmas Day in 1621. Finally, the church got into the act, when in 1700 Bishop Thomas Wilson banned baseball, cudgleball, cricket, and Morris dancing on the Isle of Man.

So, where did Abner Doubleday fit into this historical flow and what really happened in Cooperstown, NY, at Elihu Phinney’s cow pasture in 1839? After all, the Baseball Hall of Fame is a national landmark, prompting an annual wave of 250,000 pilgrims who invade the otherwise sleepy town to bask in the aura of what they believe to be the birthplace of our national pastime.

Spoiler alert

Abner Doubleday, decorated Civil War general, was not in Cooperstown in 1839. He was at West Point. He did not invent the game, create the rules, draw the diagram for the field, or, as far as his voluminous diaries point out, play the game. As a result, he is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame.  

Doubleday’s designation as “Father of Baseball” was a rather clumsy creation of “The Mills Commission,” a group of individuals called together by sporting goods manufacturer Albert Spalding who enthroned Gen. Doubleday on the basis of a debunked letter written by one Abner Graves, who claimed that he was present at the moment of creation. As a side note, Mr. Graves ended a rather tumultuous life in an insane asylum after killing his wife over a real estate dispute. He had also claimed to be a Pony Express rider and to have rounded the Cape of Horn when he was 14. The prosecution rests.

The questions continue as the light begins to fade on another winter’s day. But, enough of this parade of potential “Final Jeopardy” questions. What could have been at the heart of this deception? If rounders and cricket were the parents of baseball centuries before, why craft and market a fiction that elevated a small New York town and an unsuspecting military veteran to legendary prominence?

Wiser minds than ours have quietly come to the same conclusion. Laying claim to baseball as the truly American game is … wait for it … an unadulterated example of “American exceptionalism.” Sound eerily familiar? It’s right up there with “my dad’s the strongest dad and my mom’s the prettiest mom,” only on an international scale. It’s “look how much better we are than the rest of you because we invented baseball.” Is there a pattern here?  

Just asking.

Will we enjoy a good game on a spring afternoon when our local high school takes the field in a crucial league game? Of course we will. Will we while away a rainy July afternoon watching the Yankees battle the Red Sox on network television? Count on it. It’s certainly worth the trip to see the Hartford Yard Goats or the Hudson Valley Renegades.

Does “American exceptionalism” make baseball our game and the rest of the world be damned? 

Not a chance.  

Play ball. •