Jacques Barzun, the French-born American cultural historian, famously wrote that “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” His observation is more than a witty aphorism. Unlike other American sports, baseball is linked to every major development in the nation’s history (yes, including the Revolutionary War). Starting as an improvised urban activity, the game began to take its modern-day form in the 1830s and 1840s, spreading first throughout the Northeast and then gradually by the 1880s to every part of the expanding nation. Initially a pastime for middle-class wasps, it was embraced by the first great wave of German and Irish immigrants as a way to achieve acceptance as a patriotic American. Later ethnic and racial groups followed the same path—Poles, Jews, and Italians by the 1930s, and Latin players in the 1940s and ’50s. And baseball was popular among black Americans from early on. Attendance at games in the so-called Negro leagues regularly numbered in the thousands; when Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier, over half of the 26,623 fans at Ebbets Field were black.
Baseball naturally followed the turn-of-the-century trend toward commercialization and growth. At first an informal club game with a strong social base, the sport was moving toward consolidation into a major industry by the end of the nineteenth century. In the first half of the twentieth, it reigned supreme among American sports. And over the second half of that century, even as other sports eclipsed it in popularity, baseball retained a peculiar hold on its followers, who are generally considered the most traditionalist of sports fans. Even today, in plotting their yearly calendars, many die-hards mark the beginning of spring not on the vernal equinox, but on the date when their team’s pitchers and catchers report to Florida or Arizona for spring training. (Spring came earliest for fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers this year, with pitchers and catchers reporting on February 9.)
Despite its intimate and long-standing connection to American culture, baseball did not always attract interest among scholars as an American phenomenon. It was, however, the first sport with a serious journalistic tradition. By the late nineteenth century, sports writers wrote about the game for a growing audience, as almost every newspaper in America had a sports section. Most baseball writing before World War II took the form of game reports and summaries for fans who had missed what happened to their favorite team. At the same time, columnists emerged who described the game in greater depth, including such talents as Grantland Rice, Red Smith, and Ring Lardner. Lardner’s baseball writing reached the level of serious literature in such works as You Know Me Al (1916), about an ignorant, blowhard pitcher in the second decade of the twentieth century. There were even attempts at historical analysis, usually in the form of team histories and biographies of former players. Frank Graham and Fred Lieb wrote the best of these; the latter’s Baseball As I Have Known It (1977), a memoir covering the sixty-six years he spent as a baseball journalist, doubles as a serious analysis of the sport’s growing popularity in the early twentieth century.
Hemingway said that all American literature derives from one book, Huckleberry Finn. In like fashion, all serious study of baseball—and, by extension, all other American sports—dates from the work of one man, Harold Seymour.
In the 1940s, Seymour was studying for his Ph.D. in history at Cornell University and proposed as his thesis topic the history of baseball, particularly the development of the game in the nineteenth century. The proposal was initially rejected on the grounds that it lacked scholarly significance. Seymour convinced the thesis committee that, on the contrary, there was considerable primary material on the history of the game, and developments in baseball had mirrored what was happening in the nation, particularly the efforts of middle-class workers to find a sporting outlet in which they could participate.
Under the prodding of Dorothy Seymour Wells, his wife and eventual coauthor, Seymour published his thesis in what later became a three-volume history of baseball. The first volume, Baseball: The Early Years (1960), covered the various developments of the sport up to approximately 1900 and indicated the reasons for its growing popularity: ease of play, simple rules, and the gradual proliferation of teams and leagues, ending with the professionalization of the sport by the 1870s. Reviews were positive, arguing among other things that Seymour had single-handedly legitimized writing about what was an interesting but otherwise insignificant sporting activity.
The same year that Seymour’s book appeared, a now largely forgotten memoir of a baseball season as seen through the eyes of a player, Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season, also went into print. What made it unique was that Brosnan wrote it himself. It was not an “as told to” baseball book. For the first time, a player reported what went on in the dugout (or in the bullpen, in Brosnan’s case) and captured the range of emotions that players experienced. Angst was a common theme. The baseball establishment was not happy, but the acerbic baseball writer Jimmy Cannon called it the best book about baseball ever written.
Six years later, Lawrence Ritter, a professor of finance at New York University, inspired by the work of John and Alan Lomax in rounding up recordings of American folk music, got the idea to interview players from baseball’s early years. For The Glory of Their Times, Ritter sat down with twenty-six players from roughly the years 1900–30, when baseball became America’s number-one sport. No one had thought to do something like this, largely because the game was viewed as not serious enough to warrant that kind of analysis. The book was an instant success and eventually sold almost 400,000 copies. Ritter gave his royalties, which reached $250,000, to the players and their families. The Glory of Their Times broke ground: it spawned a plethora of books of interviews with players for their perspectives on the game. Since then, there have been hundreds more, none with the charm of Ritter’s.
By the 1970s, the history of baseball was beginning to be taken seriously by intellectuals as a topic worthy of study. Even The New Yorker, that bastion of culture and upper-middle-class ennui, began to take notice of baseball at the prompting of one its best editors, Roger Angell. Labeled “The Poet Laureate of Baseball,” Angell wrote lyrically about the sport, and his studies of the game’s uniqueness and centrality to American life, especially his first book, The Summer Game (1972), did much to burnish baseball’s image. The New Yorker’s stamp of approval made writing about baseball an acceptable literary endeavor, and the 1970s saw a number of major baseball studies appear: Robert Creamer’s 1974 biography of Babe Ruth, which set the standard for future baseball biographical studies; Roger Kahn’s influential study of Brooklyn Dodgers players after their careers ended, The Boys of Summer (1972); and the pitcher Jim Bouton’s exposé of the secret side of a baseball player’s life, Ball Four (1970). The last changed sports writing, and perhaps not for the better. Journalists became relentless in exposing the faults and foibles of the game’s players and owners. Nothing was off-limits. When one player mentioned his wife had just had a baby, a reporter asked, “Bottle or breast?”
The scholarly study of baseball’s past took a major stride forward in 1971 with the founding of the Society for American Baseball Research, or sabr. Its aim was to foster the study of baseball’s past and disseminate information about the game and its various intricacies, especially its unique statistical dimension. The organization grew rapidly, and by the 1980s it was revolutionizing the public understanding of baseball’s role in American life by examining not just Major League Baseball but also the history of the minor leagues, of minorities in baseball (especially in the Negro leagues, which had their heyday from the 1920s to the late 1940s), and even of women’s baseball. In analyzing baseball’s statistical records, sabr members have made some surprising statistical corrections: Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average was reduced from .367 to .366, for instance, and Hack Wilson’s record single-season rbi total, long thought to be 190, was increased by one. sabr’s studies also cleared up many of the sport’s popular myths: the game had no single inventor but was derived from various English bat-and-ball games; Abner Doubleday, long revered as one of the sport’s founding fathers, in fact had nothing to do with baseball; before the sport was formally segregated in the nineteenth century, a handful of blacks had played in the mlb; and Babe Ruth may have called his home run in the 1932 World Series after all.
A by-product of this new glut of baseball analysis was the development of different methods of measuring baseball success. The leading lights of this new wave of baseball junkies—such as John Thorn, currently the official historian of Major League Baseball, and the statistician Peter Palmer—have changed the way writers look at the sport. Bill James, often regarded as the dean of this new school of baseball analytics (known as “sabermetrics,” a term he coined), published the first edition of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, a detailed, decade-by-decade analysis of baseball history. His new approach de-emphasized hitters’ batting averages, for instance, in favor of a more holistic measurement, ops: on-base percentage plus slugging percentage. To measure pitching success, he focused on individual statistics such as strikeouts or walks (prorated on a per-nine-inning basis) rather than credited wins and losses, which often reflect factors beyond a pitcher’s control. Interestingly, after all the new analysis, the greatest baseball player is still the same one that traditional fans knew, Babe Ruth.
Another sign of the growing seriousness of baseball study was the sudden appearance of courses on baseball history on American college campuses. With titles such as “The Myth and Magic of Our National Pastime,” “Baseball in American Culture,” and “American History through Baseball,” baseball courses sprung up across the nation in the 1980s, even at the likes of Penn and Harvard. In 1985, I asked the dean of my school, La Salle University, if he would approve such a course, to be titled “Baseball and American Culture.” He was dubious and asked that I show him similar courses taught elsewhere. When I came back with a list of baseball courses offered at over a hundred schools, including one taught by the leading Civil War historian William Gienapp at Harvard, he gave me approval. The total today of such courses must be close to a thousand.
Attempts have been made to use other sports—boxing, football, basketball—to sketch America’s unique history, but with little success. Only baseball has been deeply imbedded in American life to the extent that it can be called a cornerstone of our past.
