Babicz Martin C. - National pastime U.S. history through baseball

National Pastime

The American Ways Series

General Editor: John David Smith

Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History,

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

This series provides concise, accessible treatments of central topics in the American experience. Titles first appear in hardcover and eBook editions for a general audience and subsequently appear in reasonably priced paper editions for classroom use.

Current Titles in the Series

How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture, by Jennifer Jensen Wallach

Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America, by Manfred Berg

Bounds of their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History, by Paul Harvey

This Green and Growing Land: Environmental Activism in American History, by Kevin C. Armitage

National Pastime

U.S. History Through Baseball

Martin C. Babicz and Thomas W. Zeiler

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Copyright 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

ISBN 978-1-4422-3584-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4422-3585-4 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To the memory of my grandfather, the original Martin C. Babicz, who used to make the annual pilgrimage to Cooperstown with me; and to my grandchildrenHazel, Julian, Alex, Brenda, and Osmaramay they come to love history and baseball as much as their grandfather does.

And to Jules Tygiel, a friend, colleague, and inspirational historian of baseball.

Contents

Acknowledgments

baseball is a team sport , and so is writing a book. National Pastime: United States History though Baseball would not have been possible without the assistance of many people who aided in all stages of the research and writing of this book.

We would like to thank Jon Sisk and John David Smith of Rowman & Littlefield, who have shown an enormous amount of faith in this project. We would also like to thank Katelyn Powers of Rowman & Littlefield, who has assisted with the illustrations for this volume.

Dr. Steve Dike-Wilhelm, a historian at the University of Colorado Boulder, read the entire manuscript and offered numerous suggestions to improve it. Other people who read portions of the book and suggested improvements include Dr. Karen Lloyd DOnofrio, who at the time was a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado, and Scott Wilson, a history teacher at Omaha Central High School.

Librarians at the University of Colorado Boulder have been of great assistance in searching for and locating resources, especially Brittany Reed, who literally retrieved dozens of volumes necessary for this books completion, and Michael Harris, who helped with identifying the publishers of baseball songs.

People with firsthand knowledge of various aspects of the games history were generous in sharing their expertise. A special thank you goes out to Major League Baseball senior vice president Katy Feeney, who provided information about women in baseball, and former professional softball player Mary Lou Pennington, who answered questions about the International Womens Professional Softball Association.

Kelli Bogan and John Horne at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Library in Cooperstown have been a great help in providing photographs for use as illustrations. Jacob Pomrenke at the Society for American Baseball Research in Tucson has also helped with locating illustrations.

The hundreds of students who have enrolled in our course, America through Baseball, as well as smaller seminars on sports and society, deserve a callout. Many were and are fans who also questioned our analogies, analyses, and, sometimes during our ranting fits, our sanity! All are to be thanked for challenging us to be better teachers as we linked baseball to history.

Finally, we would like to thank our families for their patience and understanding over the past three years. Marty Babicz is especially grateful to his wife, LouAnn; his daughters, Brittany and BreeAnna; his son and daughter-in-law, Benjamin and Lupita; his grandchildren, Hazel, Julian, Alex, Brenda, and Osmara; his mother, Aneita; and his mother-in-law, Mary Lou, for the love and support they provided him while he worked on this project. He would also like to thank his late father, Ronald, who, in the 1960s, introduced him to a band of lovable losers called the New York Mets. Tom Zeiler thanks Rocio, Jackson, and Ella for their long, patient support, and his father, Mikea Red Sox and Ted Williams fan with the misfortune of growing up in Yankees territorywho instilled a love of the game. This book would not have happened without them.

Foreword

the poet walt whitman triumphantly noted baseballs connection to the American democratic experiment. In his collection Leaves of Grass in 1855, and a few years later in an editorial to the New York Times , he followed the outcome of some games played in Brooklyn. But as the game matured and professionalized (he sniffed at play for pay) over the next three decades, Whitman came to believe that baseball was more than just a sport. Near the end of his life, as he witnessed the two American teams return from a world tour in 1889 led by sports equipment tycoon and baseball owner Albert G. Spalding, Whitman yearned to hear about the players adventures as young Americans representing their dynamic country. For him, baseball had become the game of the republic! It was, simply, our game: thats the chief fact in connection with it: Americas game... [was] just as important in the sum total of our historic life. Toning down the hyperbole, we agree with his linkage of baseball and history.

National Pastime shows how baseball is interlinked with the history of the United States, and, to an extent, vice versa. While it would be presumptuous to claim that the sport shaped America, it certainly serves as a window through which we can examine and clarify American history. And at key moments, it actually defined historical and contemporary discourse. For instance, well before the US military was desegregated or Martin Luther King Jr. was a household name, baseball pioneered integration with Jackie Robinsons debut in Brooklyn on April 15, 1947. This is the most famous case in which baseball influenced the course of history, but it should also be acknowledged that the sport led the way in drawing the color line in the first place, a decade before the Supreme Courts Plessy v. Ferguson ruling allowed legal segregation in 1896. Our book seeks to trace the history of baseball, but more than that, the history of America through baseball. Thus, it aims to point out trends, issues, and change in American society (and, by the concluding chapters, other parts of the world as well).

Other historians have written books about the history of baseball, but few have tied American history and baseball history together in a comprehensive fashion, covering the broad chronological sweep of three centuries in a relatively short space, and done so with no apologies for drawing connections many mainstream historians might consider trivial. We follow in the giant steps of great writers and scholars on baseballJules Tygiel, Charles Alexander, David Voigt, George Vecsey, John Rossi, and even Albert Spaldingwho proved that baseball reveals the history of the United States. National Pastime is indebted to them, but their audience was different than ours. While we welcome the public as readers, we target students in the hopes that they will absorb American history in a new and engaging way. We are academic historians but also fans of the game, so we have an eye on teaching through the medium of sports.