the poet walt whitman triumphantly noted baseball’s 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: that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s 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 Robinson’s 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 Court’s 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 baseball—Jules Tygiel, Charles Alexander, David Voigt, George Vecsey, John Rossi, and even Albert Spalding—who 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.
And why not? Considering that sports, like food and music, are among the few universal means of provoking deep, gut-level emotions in people, a book about the intimate ties of baseball to history seems necessary. After all, as readers will note in the following pages, baseball paralleled many of the developments and issues facing society at large (professionalization, labor/management relations, reform, war, westward expansion, technology, globalization, race, gender, etc.). But it also generated a rising tide of fortunes—first for owners and then for players, cities, and the media—as well as persistent excitement that prompts fans today to spend billions of dollars watching, analyzing, and playing the game. Spectators are provoked into fits of joy and awe, or sadness, disgust, and anger, if their team wins or loses. That is the immediate draw, but the sheer athleticism of the sport is not our focus. The profound, long-term effect, we believe, is how performances on the field shape or reflect on the history off of it.
The book proceeds chronologically through the history of baseball and America. It is accompanied by charts, tables, and an appendis that chronicle important moments in the history of the game. We hope the book’s chapters stand alone as useful tools in investigating individual eras, but we also project that the entire book can serve as a companion to standard historical texts and narratives of the United States. And above all, we seek for students to understand the ability of baseball to reflect history, whether it is good or bad. Walt Whitman would have approved of that mission, as he steadfastly believed that because baseball was “our game, the American game,” its legacy needed to be included in the story of the nation.