Baseball in Blue and Gray : The National Pastime during the Civil War

Rating:
Summary: Baseball - outlined against a blue, gray historical backdrop
Review: George Kirsch's book about baseball during the middle of the 19th century, particularly the Civil War years, is a little too scholarly and a little too detailed to be considered light reading, in spite of its fairly small size.

But it's still a very engaging book, which will inform and entertain reasonably literate baseball fans (yes, I know these often seem scarce).

The Abner Doubleday legend was put to bed long ago, as was the myth that Lincoln, on his deathbed, begged Doubleday to keep baseball alive (with a bullet lodged 6 inches in his brain, Lincoln never regained consciousness after being shot).

Still, traditionalists will find much to cheer, for in place of these legends, and in a relatively short space, Kirsch provides a wealth of information that actually does establish baseball as a uniquely American activity.

The traditionally English pastime of rounders is of distant ancestry to American baseball, more so than cricket, but as Kirsch notes - citing Henry Chadwick - baseball modified and improved in the United States to an extent almost to deprive it of any or its original features beyond the mere groundwork of the game.

Chadwick's name comes up frequently in this volume, and Kirsch provides information justifying the present-day consensus that the English-born American-raised Chadwick was the "father" of modern-day baseball - having extensively promoted the game, worked assiduously in an effort to keep it free of corruptive elements such as gambling, and invented the first set of statistics and box scores to record and summarize the action.

There is apparently no reliable evidence of Lincoln participating in or actively following baseball during his life, but the mystiques conjured in the imagination by both Lincoln and baseball almost demand a legendary connection between the two. The fictitious dying wish expressed by Lincoln to Doubleday is undoubtedly wish-fulfillment.

Kirsch does provide some contemporary anecdotal evidence connecting Lincoln with baseball. This includes one amusing political cartoon in which Lincoln and the three defeated presidential candidates from the 1860 election assume the easy poses of "strikers" and use baseball terminology to describe their respective views of the campaign. In this cartoon, John Breckenridge remarks that old Abe was able to make such a "good lick" because he had that "confounded rail to strike with".

The stories about baseball being played by both Union and Confederate soldiers among themselves or even against each other in between battles and in prison camps apparently have a great deal of truth to them - at least during the first two years of the war when the carnage was relatively light and provisions were relatively ample.

Interestingly enough, baseball was also played largely without interruption by many of the same amateur club members and fraternal organization members who had competed before the war - those who were able to delay or avoid military service. There are even recorded histories of baseball games being played by slaves on southern plantations.

Every time this country undergoes a national crisis, or even a local one, such as the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 - a segment of the population always decries the continuation of sporting events as unseemly and insensitive.

In this context, the fact that amateur baseball (the concept of professionals playing for monetary gain was largely unheard of at the time) continued largely unabated during the most bloody national crisis in American history should provide food for thought. Benefits from the proceeds were often donated to the war effort and remembrances acknowledged as part of the game ceremonies, as would later be the case during other crises from World War I to September 11.

Another thing that I found both informative and pleasing addresses the arguments made by today's pseudo-traditionalists like George Will, who insist that baseball was MEANT to be a unending game proceeding at a snail's pace concomitant with the lengthy passage of time on a sultry summer afternoon - and who oppose all efforts to speed up the game on that basis.

Contemporary newspaper accounts of baseball from this era make clear that the reason why America so passionately adopted baseball as its own unique brand of recreation - and why it was favorably regarded by military authorities as a pastime for soldiers was the strenuousness and fast pace of the 19th century game.

One commentator alludes to baseball as "an admirable preliminary school" for attaining the qualifications of a first-rate soldier because its practice enhanced "the endurance of bodily fatigue and the cultivation of activity of movement."

How 19th century baseball fans would regard today`s "hurlers" who stall endlessly between pitches and who throw incessantly to first base, as well as today`s "strikers" who pass interminable time preparing themselves outside of the batter's box is anyone's guess.

Rating:
Summary: Good early baseball history, not much Civil War
Review: The title of George B. Kirsch's book Baseball in Blue & Gray is a tad misleading. It implies that the book is a history of baseball as played by soldiers in the American Civil War. Though one chapter, titled battlefront, is devoted to baseball as it was played in the military and prison camps of that war, the remainder of the book is best captured by its sub-title - The National Pastime During the Civil War. As a history of how baseball developed, progressed, and grew into the American National Pastime during the first half of the 1860s, this book does a fine job. If, however, you are looking for a book full of Civil War baseball antidotes, you will find this book a disappointment.
Kirsch begins with a quick history lesson on the origins of baseball. He claims that the game is distantly related to the English game of rounders, not the more famous English bat and ball game cricket. Rounders underwent a major transformation in America, and emerged as the game of townball, a unique American version of the game that was widely played throughout the country in the antebellum years. In the 1840s, a New York club, the Knickerbockers, developed rules of play for townball that qualified it as the earliest form of baseball. This New York style of play became quickly popular, and by the 1850s had spread all over the region and beyond. Kirsch claims that the soldiers in the Civil War helped to spread the new form of the game around the country, but has little more than antidotal evidence for this claim.
The real virtue of Baseball in Blue & Gray is not its Civil War tie in, put the wealth of knowledge on the early development of baseball in the days before professional leagues. Kirsch shows how the game progressed from being an amusement of a few gentlemen's clubs in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston in the 1850s, to having an honest claim to the title of the National Pastime by 1870. He tells how men like Henry Chadwick and Albert Spalding help to shape what the game became, and shows why their names are enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
At 135 pages, Baseball in Blue & Gray is but a brief book. It is written in a clear and concise manner, and is easy reading. Anyone interested in the history of the origins and development of baseball should find it worthwhile, although those who are searching primarily for the Civil War angle may find it a bit disappointing, as it was somewhat of a stretch to market this baseball history as Civil War literature.