Sports Biblio Digest, 1.20.19: Deconstructing Baseball’s Creation Myth
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Bob Costas; Marty Brennaman; Muhammad Ali Airport; Anger and Baseball Hall of Fame Voting; Football Helmets at Paris Fashion Week; The Godmother of Title IX; Remembering Mel Stottlemyre, Bob Kuechenberg and Gus Ganakas; Non-Sports Reads
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The half-century between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I was one of the most eventful periods in American history, and the professional formation of organized sports reflected those times.
As the United States and the developed world evolved from agrarian societies to industrialized ones, the games they played during these Victorian years also changed, often quite rapidly. Leisurely pursuits gave way to serious competitions orchestrated by often cold-hearted entrepreneurs who spotted plentiful opportunities to cash in on Gilded Age fortunes and a burgeoning entertainment dollar.
Foremost among those entities was professional baseball, whose prominence over cricket still wasn’t a guarantee in the aftermath of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.
Although troops on both sides of the conflict avidly played baseball, the game needed a generous dose of manufactured sentiment and an even heavier supply of pure business hucksterism to be designated “The National Pastime” as the 20th century arrived.
Eminent baseball historian John Thorn addresses these myths and ruses in entertaining detail in “Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret Early History of the Game,” published in 2011 by Simon & Schuster.
The author of the long-running “Total Baseball” book series and many other books on baseball and American football history, Thorn finds many shibboleths to slice open long before he gets to the coup de grâce: Demolishing the fabricated claim that baseball was founded by Abner Doubleday, a former Union general.
On the very first page, Thorn is blunt about his debunking aim, as well as his delight in appreciating the perpetual contradictions that baseball lovers will always accept. Baseball, he writes, is a sport:
“. . . whose whole history is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community and fair play.
“Yet we love both the game and the flimflam because they are both so . . . . American. Baseball has been blessed in equal measure by Lincoln and Barnum.”
Baseball’s eventual triumph over cricket came about due to a number of factors, including the development of rules and bylaws. The growing popularity of gambling, statistics and spectacle cemented its status among the masses. Thorn writes that in the antebellum period in particular, gambling “was not the impediment to the game’s flourishing but instead the vital fertilizer.”
Familiar stories are woven together, of the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, and the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. So are other more obscure events and figures, including Jim Creighton, a pitcher for the Brooklyn Excelsiors in the aftermath of the war years and whom Thorn thinks is the “most important player not in the Baseball Hall of Fame.”
His premature death didn’t deter the more organized forces behind baseball from rolling out professional teams, eventually in three leagues before the turn of the century. This growth “coincided with national economic prosperity.”
Baseball’s original sin, which came about long before that creation myth, was the reserve clause, which kept player salaries low and player freedom non-existent. The star player John Ward, who began the Brotherhood League (to become the ill-fated Players’ League) got some of his peers to break the owners’ financial lock on their livelihoods, if only for a short while.
After an 1899 Brotherhood League players’ strike failed, Ward was sued by owners for violating the reserve clause, which had another 76 years to run its course.
By the time Albert G. Spalding took members of the Chicago White Sox and other select players on a global tour (and opened several sporting goods stores bearing his name in Australia), the American public “was gripped by a general baseball mania."
These were the 1880s, the decade baseball was ushered into the American consciousness for good:
“The national pastime became the great repository of national ideals, the symbol of all that was good in American life . . . To some, baseball looked like a new national religion all its own.”
But it was still missing its blank-slate, all-American origin story. Spalding was an eager myth-maker, with his advocacy that Doubleday, a fellow cohort in the Theosophical Society of America, be declared the founding father of a game he’s not known to have played much of a role in shaping.
Founded by the spiritualist Helena Blavatsky in 1875, the Theosophical Society sought a benign, non-sectarian form of truth, brotherhood and humanity, with an emphasis on exploring unexplained laws of nature. Blavatsky eventually moved to India and died in 1891, and was succeeded by Doubleday.
Thorn examines the movement against Spalding’s growing involvement in it, as well as that of Doubleday, who died in 1893. In 1905, the Mills Commission was created to declare an inventor of baseball. Writes Thorn:
“Baseball would become not only a huge financial success, but also a moral and cultural exemplar, a broad-based religion fitting all creeds, a secular faith of the sort the Theosophists could only envy.”
A.G. Mills, then the commissioner of the National League, presided over the commission bearing its name, and it concluded (with virtually nothing in the way of evidence) that Doubleday fashioned the game of baseball in 1839 on a cow field near his home of Cooperstown, N.Y.
In 1908, Spalding popularized the Doubleday claim, and a century after the “founding,” that’s where the Baseball Hall of Fame was christened.
On Tuesday, the Baseball Writers Association of America will announce voting for the next batch of player inductees, who will be enshrined in Cooperstown in July.
Once again, raging debates will ensue about who should get in, or not, and why, or why not (see the first link below), especially with Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens appearing to come closer than they’ve ever been.
Those arguments seem rather short-sighted compared to the legacy of baseball’s creation myth and how it continues to be uncritically celebrated today.
Thorn is not the first to write about all this, nor to explain why it endures. But his book provides an engrossing and robust societal backdrop for why the true origins of the game still matter:
“Because baseball provides us with a family album older and deeper, by many generations, than all but a handful of Americans can claim for their own lineage; because the charm of baseball today is in good measure something lighthearted in common with the harsh lives of our forefathers, going back to the nation’s earliest period and likely beyond.”
A Few Good Reads
Los Angeles Times: The Baseball Hall of Fame is a museum. It shouldn’t make you angry;
Louisville Courier-Journal: Louisville airport being renamed in honor of Muhammad Ali;
Boston Globe: Bob Costas exiting longtime home at NBC Sports;
Cincinnati Enquirer: Reds announcer Marty Brennaman retiring after 2019 season;
Cape Cod Times: Tommy Leonard’s life touched many;
Runners World: 9 Books Runners Can Get Excited for in 2019;
Outside: Rewilding the American child;
espnW: The legacy and lessons of Dr. Bernice Sandler, the godmother of Title IX;
New York Daily News: Remembering the life and legend of Mel Stottlemyre;
South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Miami Dolphins great Bob Kuechenberg dies;
Detroit Free Press: Former Michigan State basketball coach Gus Ganakas dies at 92;
CBSSports.com: Football helmets at Paris Fashion Week.
Off the Sporting Green
Some non-sports reads I’ve been enjoying and would like to share:
National Review: Before You Write: A review of “The Patch,” by John McPhee;
Associated Press: Robert Caro reflects on his career in upcoming book;
Washington Post: Keep your tidy, spark-joy hands off my book pile, Marie Kondo. At the start of every year, the personal organizers descend upon us like the plague of locusts that they are, and I find them just as annoying as the exercise-and-diet types. At least the fitness crowd doesn’t dare suggest tossing out books. There is only one way to counter this cheery advice to declutter, as Ron Charles posits in his glorious, curmudgeonly takedown:
“We’re not after sparks of joy — we want to swim in wonder.”
That may be my all-time favorite sentence about anything, ever.
Point of Personal Privilege
Atlanta Magazine: I was supposed to love being a restaurant critic. What happened? A cautionary tale about the “follow your passion” mania that has been sweeping America for far too long.
I can certainly relate to the sentiment here, as a recovering sportswriter. I deeply enjoy passing along these links and writing about sports books and history and related topics on this newsletter, and hearing from you. But my everyday interest in watching and following sports as intently as I once did has waned to just about nothing, save baseball.
As I read this piece by Wyatt Williams, who worked at my former paper, I was reminded of my then-relentless passion for the work I did at the same place years before. Now, I don’t recognize the person I was then at all. While proud of what I did, I couldn’t imagine doing it now.
Part of me would like to have a final stab at covering high school sports, if only for a year or two, although that's hardly a pure endeavor. What I tell people when they ask "what happened to you?" is simply that I came to the end of the road as a sportswriter, and not just because of what’s been happening in news media industry.
Although those were some of the best times of my career, and I will cherish them forever, I’m grateful that point of my life is over. I once feared that I would lose the passion, but that might have been a very beneficial thing to have happened. I’m content these days to dabble in whatever I please.
Williams referenced Christiane Lauterbach, the French-born grande dame of food writers in Atlanta, who’s been on the scene for decades and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I'm not much of a foodie and don't read her often, but when I do I think she’s a bit of a snob.
I also think of several sportswriters who need being in a gym or a press box, banging out 500 good words in 20 minutes, like it was oxygen. Without it, they die. My old self admires that, but I wonder what they do when there isn’t a game to attend. For someone whose personal identity was so wrapped up in that life (almost to an unhealthy degree), it's a relief to have let it go.
Williams is quite a bit younger than i am, so I hope he can find something else that’s meaningful, without being passionate in such a way that it becomes the wrong kind of obsession.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 152, published Jan. 20, 2019.
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