Baseball (3 page)

With all their free time in dugouts and bullpens and clubhouses, players still come up with new expressions for the commonplace. There are as many names for home runs as Eskimos have for snow—dingers, taters, going yard. There are words for whatever transpires after the ball is hit: Can of corn. Frozen rope. Worm-killer. Snow cone. Fans delight in eccentric names for effective pitches: Eephus. Scroogie. Lord Charles. Mister Snappy. There was even a prodigious fastball known as the Linda Ronstadt because it “Blue Bayou.”

People still relish the great player nicknames of the past. A fleet, sure-handed outfielder from Brooklyn named Robert Vavasour Ferguson, who played from 1871 to 1884, was known as “Death to Flying Things,” because of the way he tracked down fly balls. Superb players of the twentieth century were called the Georgia Peach, Old Reliable, Dizzy, and Shoeless Joe. Pepper Martin was the Wild Horse of the Osage. The aging fat-cat Yankees watched a brash rookie dash to first base on a walk during a lazy spring exhibition in 1963, which is how Pete Rose became known as Charlie Hustle.

Baseball lends itself to narration because it can be parsed and reconstructed, pitch by pitch, through the hieroglyphics on a score-card—where the characters were, what they were doing, leading to speculation about what they were thinking and saying. Corny or downright inaccurate, baseball movies and baseball novels capture
the national myths and history. We all know enough about baseball not to be taken in, yet we are, all over again, even when the actor has no semblance to a great athlete—Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig? William Bendix or John Goodman as Babe Ruth? Still, put an actor in a flannel uniform and give him something formidable to ponder (a bribe offer, a fatal illness, a provocative female owner, or a literate groupie) and Americans automatically relate.

Baseball artifacts have now become collectibles, part of Americana. A turn-of-the-century Honus Wagner card or a Mickey Mantle rookie card could help finance a college education—if it is in flawless condition, not battered and scuffed from being traded and scaled against walls by children. Baseball caps, jerseys, autographs, and assorted doodads are tradable commodities today, yet in their purest form they are an indicator of the deep hold of baseball on the American psyche.

Long before all the other team sports, baseball language wafted upon the summer breeze, from open windows and street-corner debates. Games on the radio and articles in mass newspapers made the general populace familiar with the lingo of baseball, which blended into daily life: when politicians call for harsh measures in sending criminals to jail for a long time, they talk about “three strikes and out”; somebody describing a promising first date may use the phrase “getting to second base.”

The game is celebrated in the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” particularly when bellowed by the earthy broadcaster Harry Caray, grossly shirtless, leaning out of his booth on a steamy Chicago afternoon.

The song is so pervasive in the American mind (particularly with a good old-fashioned organ accompaniment) that the government should make it part of the naturalization quiz. Even people who say they follow only golf or soccer or football secretly know the tune, to their chagrin. Paul Tagliabue, the highly effective commissioner of the National Football League—himself a jock who once led the Georgetown University basketball team in rebound-ing—professes to have been terminally bored by baseball as a child. But I bet if you jabbed him with truth serum even Tagliabue could
sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” complete with the exaggerated arm waving and mugging of Harry Caray. In fact, I'd pay money to see that very serious lawyer performing the song. It's in there somewhere.

The words were written by Jack Norworth in 1908 and the music was added by Albert Von Tilzer. Norworth's words caught the feel of the game perfectly, particularly considering that he never set foot inside a ballpark until 1940, and clearly was not influenced by television, there having been no telecasts at the time. The song immediately conjures up feelings of good times, summer days, cold beers, maybe even some knowledgeable fans sitting around me, discussing the good old days.

The sport also has its epic poem, its
Beowulf
, entitled “Casey at the Bat,” written by Ernest Lawrence Thayer in 1888, about a beloved slugger who had his chance to make the hometown fans happy:

Thayer's poem, which continues for twelve more stanzas to its inevitable dismal (“There is no joy in Mudville”) conclusion, has been performed at banquets for over a century, both in fact and fiction. In his delightful book
The Southpaw
—one of the very best baseball novels ever written, about a quirky lefty from upstate New York—Mark Harris depicts a sportswriter from the small hometown paper who recites “Casey at the Bat” whenever he has a few drinks in him:

Casey's Mudville has become the symbol of all towns that dare to root for their faltering darlings. When I wrote a book about the shocking World Series victory by the formerly hideous Mets in 1969, the editor ceremoniously wrote down the title for me on a slip of paper: “Joy in Mudville.” The book is long out of print; the title remains brilliant.

I could get mawkish and declare that the sport has gone to hell because of (a) money or (b) television or (c) the owners or (d) the players, but the truth is, today's players are consistent and familiar to us—our national sporting theater, our knights and louts and fallen angels, our saints and sinners, our samurai and shamans. We have known them a long, long time.

I
n 1937, seeking a tribe of Berbers rumored to have blond hair, an Italian demographer trekked the wilds of Libya. The demographer, Corrado Gini, not only located the tribe and confirmed its blond traits but also discovered that the tribesmen played a game involving a bat, a ball, and bases. Gini may not have known of the Giants' Mel Ott or the Yankees' Joe DiMaggio, who would play in the New York Subway Series that autumn, but he did recognize elements of the so-called American sport of baseball.

Gini filmed the Berbers playing the game, which they called “ta kurt om en mahag,” meaning “the ball of the pilgrim's mother” in the Hamitic language. Gini later presented a scholarly paper, postulating that both the light-hair genes and the ball game had surely been brought by early Europeans, long before the Christian era. He compared the Berber game to what one historian has called “ancient spring rain rituals of the Berbers,” as described by the Greek historian Herodotus 500 years before Christ.

Otherwise preoccupied with outlasting the Depression, Americans did not take notice of Gini's theory in 1937, but if they had, they would have found it somewhat inconvenient, since the young country was gearing up for a centennial celebration of baseball along with the opening of a Baseball Hall of Fame. Gini's discovery defied the American creationist myth that baseball had been invented on a certain day in 1839 in the bucolic upstate New York village of Cooperstown.

Since Gini, other historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and social scientists have discovered incidents of bat-and-ball games in the ancient past. Eons and eons before Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson arrived on this earth, people were throwing and hitting small objects, perhaps even scuttling from pillar to post, or base to base, if the spirit moved them. Bat-and-ball games seem to be a rather basic human pleasure, easily improvised by a couple of bored sentries or
monks or schoolgirls with access to a thin stick and something round. The rules sort of fall into place.

As David Block recounts in his book
Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game
there are ancient references to Lydians, Persians, Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and northern Europeans, all playing one form or another of bat-and-ball games for ritual or recreation. There are wall paintings in Egyptian royal tombs and indications of Mayans playing in the Yucatán. In 1085, an early version of the game, called “stool ball,” is mentioned in England's Domesday Book.

A drawing from Spain in 1251 shows people tossing a ball underhand and others hitting, holding a slightly tapered bat with a contemporary grip. The fielders are cautiously using two hands to catch the ball. “There's a bat and there's a ball,” Ted Spencer, the curator of the Baseball Hall of Fame, said in 2004, long after the Doubleday mythology had been sorted out. “It looks like two guys playing baseball to me,” Spencer added.

In the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, a mile from the upscale food court and retro architectural touches of the Camden Yards stadium, is a drawing from the Ghistelles Calendar from Flanders in 1301, depicting one young man pitching to another young man, who is holding a very definite bat object with a narrow handle and a thick stock.

“Great arm extension! You can kiss that one good-bye,” reads the caption in Block's book under drawings of early batting stances, the language a parody of the Mel Allens and Ernie Harwells of broadcasting, who would appear on the scene more than six centuries later.

Long before peanuts and Cracker Jack and the seventh-inning stretch, the game of baseball underwent many changes. In 1598, John Stow's classic Survey of London described one game played in that ancient city: “After dinner all the youthes go into the fields to play at the ball.…The schollers of euery schoole haue their ball, or baston, in their hands: the auncient and wealthy men of the Citie come foorth on horsebacke to see the sport of the young men, and to take part in the pleasure in beholding their agilitie.”

In London in 1744, John Newbery published a children's book,
A Little Pretty Pocket-Book
, which contained, according to Block, the first reference to the game, within the following poem:

One of the first writers ever to praise the inner qualities of baseball was a German, Johann Christoph Friedrich Gutsmuths, in his 1796 book
Games for the Exercise and Recreation of the Body and Spirit for the Youth and His Educator and All Friends of Innocent Joys of Youth.
Gutsmuths describes a game called “Ball with Free Station, or English Base-ball,” in which runners can be retired in various ways including throwing the ball at them or throwing the ball to a base and shouting “Burned!”

The cataloguer also described an eighteenth-century German version of a ball game but he preferred the English version because it demanded “attentiveness”—the alertness that parents try to teach nine-year-olds on grassy Little League fields: “Think ahead! What will you do if the ball comes to you?”

Gutsmuths even goes into minute detail of the rules, including a fascination with the possibility that two runners will wind up on the same base: “This once again calls for the order of the game: there can only be one person at one base at any time.”

Thus, in 1796, in the reign of Duke Carl August of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, Gutsmuths was projecting 130 years into the future, anticipating the base-running foibles of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1930s, who had a habit of clustering on one base or another. (Three men on third base was a specialty of those Dodgers, which earned them the nickname of the Daffiness Boys.)

Jane Austen describes the quotidian life of an eighteenth-century tomboy in her 1815 novel,
Northanger Abbey
: “It was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about
her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the age of fourteen, to books.”

In England, the bat-and-ball games evolved differently, one version branching off into cricket, with a flat bat, prevalent in southeast England, while in southwest England the ball was flipped up by a lever or catapult and became known as “One hole cat” or “One o' cat,” a phrase heard in American sandlots in the late 1940s, when children still knew how to amuse themselves by playing games on their own. In another English version, two teams circled three holes or bases before heading home, giving the name to a game called “rounders.”

Given the westward traffic across the Atlantic, it was inevitable that ball games would be imported to the New World. The earliest documented version was in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1609, not imported by English settlers but rather by Silesian glass-blowers. The game was called “palant” or “pilka palantowa” (bat ball) by the Silesians, who very quickly fled back to civilized Europe.

Two main forms of bat-and-ball games evolved in the New World. The recently coined phrase “Red Sox Nation” suggests the flinty old colonies waiting for the Red Sox to redeem them. A recent discovery confirms that people in New England and upstate New York played a game of town ball that was considerably different from the game of baseball developed around New York City at the same time.

Late in the twentieth century, researchers in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, stumbled on an ordinance from 1791 that banned the playing of baseball within eighty yards of the big church in the town square, an indication that bands of players of town ball were breaking windows and trampling bushes and interfering with commerce in a 360-degree version of the game.

The game that flourished around New York City was refined into two teams of approximately nine players. There are two newspaper references to baseball games in lower Manhattan, dating back to 1823. In 1840, a young doctor—Daniel Lucius Adams, born on November 1, 1814, in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, and a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Medical School—moved
to New York and began playing a version of baseball with a square of four bases, as part of the New York Base Ball Club. Doc Adams has only recently been advocated as a pioneer by the historian John Thorn.