Steven D. Schmitt - A History of Badger Baseball: The Rise and Fall of Americas Pastime at the University of Wisconsin

Allan H. (Bud) Selig

As a graduate of the University of WisconsinMadison, and as the former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and the ninth Commissioner of Baseball, I found Steven D. Schmitts book, A History of Badger Baseball: The Rise and Fall of Americas Pastime at the University of Wisconsin, to be of great interest and a remarkable and outstanding achievement. It is not only a history of University of Wisconsin baseball; it is much more than that. The author doesnt just present a broad outline of the good times and the bad times, the successes and the failures, and a list of the notable figures. He gives the reader a veritable pitch-by-pitch account of more than one hundred seasons of baseball. He begins with describing how a handful of players formed the institutions first baseball team in 1870 until the university dropped baseball as an intercollegiate sport because of, as he explains, budget cuts, the lack of a first-class facility, and the need to equalize athletic participation for men and women.

Along the way, he describes Badger baseball season by season, the highlights, the heroes, and the drama. One of the most compelling sagas is a 1909 trip that University of Wisconsin baseball players made to Japan, which Mr. Schmitt claims is the longest trip ever taken by college athletes. It certainly was at the time. In fact, such trips were extremely rare. Only a year earlier, in 1908, the Reach All America Team, a group of professional baseball players sponsored by a sporting goods manufacturer, toured Japan, China, the Philippines, and Hawaii. They played seventeen games in Japan and won them all. The Badgers, it is believed, were the first group of amateurs to tour Japan, and it is hard to imagine how a group of young men at that time could have embarked on such an excursion. Today, you board a plane and half a day later, you land in Tokyo. In 1909 the Wisconsin baseball players left Madison on August 20 and didnt return until October 31. The Badgers won five of nine games, which the author describes in detail, but more interesting is the cultural differences thatcertainly existed at the time and the interaction among the young American ballplayers and their Japanese hosts and competitors. Schmitt writes: The Badgers on-field chatter shocked Japanese fans. He quotes one of the Wisconsin players who wrote after the trip: They hissed us because it was a custom of theirs to carry on all contests in silence and we had broken it. We kept on with the talk, however, and before the series was over they paid no attention to it, and even sanctioned it on the part of their own boys, who picked it up very readily.

The author gives other examples of the cultural adjustments the young men from Madison had to make both on and off the field of play. He also writes that the New York Times reported at the time that the competition generated so much interest in the game throughout Japan that it helped lead to the creation of a professional league in Japan.

Schmitt goes into great depth in describing the season-by-season journey, complete with highlights as well as disappointments. He shines a light on some of the best players who attended Wisconsin, including shortstop Harvey Kuenn, a lifetime .303 hitter in the big leagues, who managed two years for me with the Brewers; outfielder Rick Reichardt, who had an eleven-year major league career; and pitcher Paul Quantrill, who pitched fourteen years in the majors, mostly in relief.

Not unexpectedly, the biggest disappointment Schmitt describes comes near the end where he goes to great lengths to explain the decision behind dropping varsity baseball as an intercollegiate sport. There is no doubt where the author lines up in this drama, and he continues to hope that the day will come when Badger baseball is revived. It is a hope shared by many alums and baseball fans.

Allan H. (Bud) Selig is a 2017 inductee into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.