Baseball has always been a central part of American culture, but did you know that it has an integral part in American history as well? From civil rights to globalization, elements of baseball have mirrored and even led these movements through time. Today, Mary is joined by Adam Cushing, BRI's COO and self-proclaimed baseball aficionado, and Dr. Vincent Cannato, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, to discuss some of the most important movements reflected in baseball and America’s love of the game.
Visit our episode page for additional resources:
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/podcasts/take-me-out-to-the-ball-game-how-does-baseball-mirror-history
Baseball has always been a central part of American culture, but did you know that it has an integral part in American history as well? From civil rights to globalization, elements of baseball have mirrored and even led these movements through time. Today, Mary is joined by Adam Cushing, BRI's COO and self-proclaimed baseball aficionado, and Dr. Vincent Cannato, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, to discuss some of the most important movements reflected in baseball and America’s love of the game.
Visit our episode page for additional resources:
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/podcasts/take-me-out-to-the-ball-game-how-does-baseball-mirror-history
Intro/Outro (00:06)
From the Bill of Rights Institute Fabric of History leaves together US history founding principles and what all of this means to us today. Join us as we pull back the curtains of the past to see what's inside.
Haley (00:20)
Baseball has always been a central part of America's culture and of water cooler talk at BRI. But did you know that it has an integral part in American history as well?
Haley (00:31)
From civil rights to globalization.
Haley (00:33)
Elements of baseball have mirrored and even led these movements through time. Today, Mary is joined by Adam Cushing, BRI COO, and self-proclaimed Baseball aficionado, and Dr. Vincent Cannato, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, to discuss some of the most important movements reflected in baseball and America's love of the game.
Mary (00:58)
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Fabric of History. I'm Mary Patterson, and I'm delighted to be with you all once again. Today, I'm joined by two very special guests to help me chew through a topic that is admittedly a little out of my League. I'm talking about America's pastime, baseball. How has baseball been a part of US history? To help me out, we have brought in the Bill of Rights Institute's own chief operating officer and hardcore Dodgers fan, Adam Cushing. Adam, thanks for being with us today.
Adam (01:35)
It's a pleasure to be here. Honestly, I really came because of the guest you're about to introduce, who I think is the real expert and just as kind of an absolute fanatical fan. I just really wanted to be here. So thank you.
Mary (01:47)
Absolutely. And without further ado, my next guest that Adam is referencing is Dr. Vincent Cannato. Dr. Cannato is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he teaches, among other things, a lecture course entitled America's National Pastime, the History of Baseball. Dr. Cannato, thank you so much for being with us today.
Dr. Cannato (02:10)
Thanks for having me on, Mary.
Mary (02:12)
So even for a baseball philistine like myself, this course that you're teaching sounds fascinating, so I can't wait to talk about it with you. And I'm sure Adam will have much more educated questions and comments as we go along. But before we play ball and listeners, I challenge you to point out or comment on all the terrible puns I'm going to try to throw into this conversation. Let me give you a little background on how we came to this topic. We have discussed on The Fabric of History before associations and leisure time. And we mentioned baseball, and we concluded that baseball is such a big thing that it really needs its own conversation. And baseball, as a part of that conversation of leisure time, is all about society in our community and how we need downtime as much as we need formal government institutions. And BRI is all about teaching civics. We love our formal government institutions, but we also need these informal community traditions and institutions like Little League in the World Series as part of our society. So that's kind of how we came back to this topic of baseball and why I'm sitting here today with Adam and Dr. Cannato. So shall we play ball as they say?
Adam (03:33)
Let's play. Let's take the field.
Mary (03:34)
Let's play. Okay. So I have to start with this course that you teach. So why do you use baseball as your lens to talk about US history?
Dr. Cannato (03:46)
First of all, we're trying in this day and age, you and your listeners are probably aware that history is a tougher sell. I don't want to say a hard sell, but a tougher sell to students. Getting them interested in history, there's also a sense that history is boring. So in our Department, we're trying to come up with lecture courses, especially at the introductory level, that provide students a window into history that is more interesting for them. So I use baseball as a way to talk about American history. There are so many themes in American history that you can talk about using baseball. So we talk about the great teams and great players in baseball. We talk about playing styles and how they evolve. But we also managed to tie in some of these themes in US history to what's happening on ball fields. One of the best examples, of course, is Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball, talking about race relations in America, talking about segregation, talk about the rise of Jim Crow in the late 18 hundreds, and that really mirrors Jim Crow and baseball and what's happening in baseball. And then the same thing when we get to the 1940s with Jackie Robinson, you have the integration of the military and then Jackie Robinson, and then a decade later, you get Brown v.
Dr. Cannato (05:05)
Board of Education and the Civil Rights movement.
Mary (05:08)
So there's a lot of things that you just said that I'm fascinated by. First, my heart breaks when you say that history is becoming a harder sell because it's boring. Just the history teacher inside of me just cries inside because students would say that to me as a former high school history teacher. And I'm just like, no, you're just wrong. You're wrong. And I'm going to prove you wrong. So I think we should all again, I can't wait. When this course is online, Dr. Cannato, I'm definitely signing up.
Dr. Cannato (05:38)
I'll let you know.
Mary (05:39)
Okay, so you mentioned that there are so many themes we chatted before in your course and race and segregation being a big one. And the story of Jackie Robinson. I think it's such a powerful story, and we love powerful stories at BRI. And even as someone who's not a huge baseball person, I mean, I know the story of Jackie Robinson, and I knew it was significant, but I think if you really pause and Zoom in on his story, I think there's a greater appreciation for just how significant it was. So can you, I guess, walk us through. What was baseball like before or what was this idea of the color bar? So I always do the phrase Jackie Robinson breaks the color bar, but I didn't really know what that meant. So could you break that down a little bit for us?
Dr. Cannato (06:36)
Yeah. There is a color line that exists in baseball. It's interesting that it was never a rule. It was always an informal agreement among owners not to hire African American players. There are in the 1880s, there are some African American players in professional baseball. But that window closes very quickly. And from the late 1880s down to the 1940s, there's a color line. It's an informal one. There's no law. It's not done by law. It's not done by Congress. It's not even an agreement. It's just sort of an unspoken code among owners that they won't integrate baseball, but they'll keep it segregated. And ultimately, it's the Brooklyn Dodgers and their general manager, Branch Rickey, who decide, hey, let's break this unwritten rule. We want to find the best player. We're putting together the best team. There had been some others before Rickey, who had kind of toyed with the idea. Sometimes they like to pass along light-skinned players as Native Americans. Perhaps that was an attempt to kind of get around these things. But it was really Rickey. He was a complex man. He certainly had what were progressive ideas about race for the time, but he also wanted to win. And that's the story. And that's how they broke down the color line. And he chose Robinson specifically. He just wasn't any player. He chose Jackie Robinson specifically to do this.
Adam (08:07)
I've always been fascinated about his breaking of the color barrier there. And I've always wondered, was Rickey always going to be first? Because I've always was struck by the fact that as soon as the color line was broken within, there was teams began to sign other players very quickly. And so I've always kind of wondered where a bunch of teams kind of sitting there thinking about it and kind of going, I don't want to be the first one. But as soon as someone took that first step, boom, a whole bunch of people said, well, I want those players, too. I want the best players.
Dr. Cannato (08:44)
Yes. Although you do have to remember that not every team jumped into the integration game.
Adam (08:49)
Not everyone.
Dr. Cannato (08:50)
Right. The last team to integrate was the Boston Red Sox, and it was about a decade after Jackie Robinson. The Yankees were the second last team to integrate. And even when the teams do integrate, it's interesting. They will usually only have when we're talking the late 40s, 50s two or three African American players. There's almost an informal quota on the number of black players that a team would have. The Dodgers would be an exception. The Giants were another team that had a few more African Americans. Later, the Cardinals Bill Veck, who is an interesting owner, and he was kind of a renegade owner. At one point. He wanted to buy I forget which team and field an all African-American baseball team, I think. But the owners didn't really like him. That was so there were others who were kind of toying with the idea. But yeah, once Rickey and this is true in society in general. The first person kind of breaks down one of these barriers, then others come along and rush in.
Mary (09:48)
That's a really interesting comment. I was thinking that as you were telling that story and Adam, as you ask that question, it's like no one wants to be the first one to say, I have a question or I need to speak up for something. And the other thing well, two more things. The other thing about this Manarchy, I had never heard of his part of the story you just hear about Jackie Robinson. But I think it's interesting to note that whenever we talk about someone whose name does get passed on and is famous for doing something significant, there's always these other people involved in that story that sometimes aren't we don't get to hear their names or their stories as much. So it's almost like we all kind of stand on the shoulders of other people and doing great things.
Dr. Cannato (10:31)
Rickey was also an innovator in baseball, generally speaking, even before Jackie, he had basically created what we know as the modern minor League system. So, yeah, he was an innovator known even before this. He was someone who was trying to do new things in baseball. And I think it takes that kind of a personality to do something like this.
Mary (10:53)
Yes, that is really interesting. I am a little familiar with the minor leagues because I am a Baltimore Orioles fan by marriage, which means basically whenever I get together with my husband's family, they just yell about the Orioles with each other. And my understanding is they've been bad for a very long time. But there are some prospects at the Minor League level. So just putting that out there for all you fellow Orioles fans or Orioles fans through marriage. But there was another piece of that story of Jackie Robinson that was really interesting. So you mentioned that in the 1880s that there were some African American players playing professionally. I never knew that. And I also think that's really fascinating if you think about sort of American history writ large. And when we have this period after the Civil War with Reconstruction, there's really some huge changes in our society. And you have African Americans serving in Congress, and you have African Americans serving in all these positions, and you have African Americans playing baseball. But that window is very as you said, it's very short or closes very quickly. So I think that's really another interesting way in which baseball is kind of a mirror of our history writ large.
Mary (12:12)
But I wanted to ask you about the Negro Leagues, so I know that there was a Negro League. And did that keep existing after Jackie Robinson signs on? Or how does that sort of peter out?
Dr. Cannato (12:26)
That's one of the stories about integration. Ultimately, the story of integration means the end of the Negro Leagues. Not immediately. The Negro leads kind of limp along into the 1950s, but once the best black players could go into the major leagues, that meant really the end of the Negro Leagues. There's a parallel there to this broader story of integration. During the time of integration, you had black neighborhoods in various cities that were sort of centers of culture. I think in Harlem, down in DC, along U Street, there are pockets of African American businesses, culture. And once integration began, those neighborhoods start to kind of fall apart because African Americans were not kept in those they had more opportunities, not perfect opportunities, not perfect opportunities, but they had more. And the same thing with the Negro Leagues. It was really the end. So it's a positive story about the integration of baseball, but the loss of this institution, which was important in the black community.
Mary (13:32)
Yeah, I do think that loss there is. We always think I think of integration in Brown v. Board as huge victories, and they certainly were in the case of realizing this, our founding principle of equality. But as you said, there is something that is lost at the same time. That's a really interesting comment.
Dr. Cannato (13:53)
It's not in defense of segregation, right? Yeah. I think it's probably was better for African American players to be able to go into the major leagues, show off their talents to a broader audience and get bigger paychecks, and so forth. But the Negro Leagues mostly had a black fan base, and that was also a cultural experience. It was important. These were important institutions in the black community.
Mary (14:18)
Yeah. I want to so before we move into a new play, I don't know. Is that work, a new play? Can you say that in baseball? I don't even know. That shows you how terrible I am. But I did want to say that just to circle back to Jackie Robinson as an individual. So I think that what's interesting about his story is that he had his own personal courage and his own talent as a player, but also as a citizen to be the first one to break the color barrier and the threats and everything that he faced and that his family faced. I think it's really a story of courage and significance. BRI has an online textbook that you guys can check out on mybri.org called Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. And we have a story we have Jackie Robinson's story on there. And I just want to read you as we close out Jackie Robinson. Here is a quote from that story, because it's so powerful. And even for people who aren't super baseball fans, I think it really is worth revisiting his story and what it means in the larger picture.
Mary (15:30)
And it says the stories of Robinson and other African American pioneers are often seen as simply part of the history of baseball rather than as a turning point in American history. That served as a spark for the larger civil rights movement. As Martin Luther King Jr. Once said, Jackie Robinson was, and I quote, a Pilgrim that walked in the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom. He was a sit inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides. If Martin Luther King Jr. Is describing you in these terms, that's pretty high praise. I think that's definitely a story worth telling and worth revisiting. So why don't we take a quick break and see what other baseball stories we can explore?
Mary (16:20)
Before our break, we really zoomed in a little bit on Jackie Robinson's story and this idea of race and segregation and baseball mirroring sort of what's going on in the United States writ large. So now I want to Zoom out a little bit and just think about baseball in general. So what is it about baseball, in your opinion, Adam Dr. Cannato, that makes it our national pastime? Why do we call it that? Why isn't football our national pastime?
Dr. Cannato (16:51)
I mean, football might be more popular today than baseball. And the way things are going, there's a lot of nostalgia wrapped up with baseball. It's a very nostalgic game about history more than any other sport. It's about history. It's about the past. It's about connections. Fathers and sons, especially fathers and daughters as well, playing catch, these connections across generations. It's about the seasons, right? It begins in the spring when things are coming back to life, at least up here in the North, baseball begins, and then it blossoms in the summertime. Everybody's outside playing. People are going games. And then in the fall, when we start, things get cold and we start retreating in baseball winds down with the World Series. It follows the rhythms of the season. It's a pastoral game, at least in our mythology. We associate with Field of Dreams, with a country with cornfields. There's that nostalgia. The reality is baseball began as an urban game. It began as a game in cities, but that's also important as well because we're also an urbanized country. But it's that Jeffersonian idea that's very romantic in the American mindset. So I think all these things help draw us to baseball. It's also got its own rhythms. It has no time to it. There's no time limits to it. It's got an open-ended game. It's played on these broad green fields. It's less violent than football, of course, which I think helps it in some ways. So all these things, I think, are wrapped up in how we see baseball.
Adam (18:25)
Yeah. One of my thoughts has always been that while it's a team sport, there's a real individual element to it. And I know even when I played as a kid, it appealed to me a lot more than, say, football. You could often go and find and go play catch with a handful of people or bat with a handful of people or kind of just show up with your gloves somewhere and be able to play. You might be able to do that with football, but it just wasn't as often. And I do think it kind of appeals to that. I don't know that kind of ideal of American individualism where I can go be the great pitcher, I can be the batter, I'm the centerfielder. Everybody sort of has their role. But there's all these kind of distinct competitions where the pitcher versus the batter. Once the ball is hit, then the fielders are in play and so on and so forth. And I've just always kind of thought that was something that appealed to me
Mary (19:23)
To comment, so first I'll comment on I love the phrase Doctor Cannato, you had these rhythms, right, the seasonal rhythms, which I never thought about before, but that makes a lot of sense. And I distinctly remember I can't keep track of time now, but if it must have been last spring when everything had been totally shut down, or maybe it was this spring, I have a little one. So my sense of time is just like, what day is it? But my husband and I and our son were going for a walk, and we saw a Little League team in a field practicing, and it was one of the first times we had seen kids outside together since of all the covid shutdowns. And we were like, I think we both were just so happy. And there was this big, normal seat, like kids playing baseball. That's what that made me think of. And I think you're right that it's just very much part of our community, this idea of it's a tradition. It's part of our collective identity. We say we won. I didn't win anything. I was just watching. But we still say we won the game.
Mary (20:29)
I think that's really powerful association and community is really powerful. And again, even for someone like me who's not I'm not a seasoned ticket holder, but I appreciate that about baseball. And I think that that's definitely if it's an entry point to get students into history, then I'm especially all for it because I think these stories about people on the teams and about the teams themselves and where they go and the story of the sport is if that hooks you in, then, hey, we'll take whatever wins we can get. So we started off by saying, what is it about baseball? And I think we've shown it's a big part of our traditions and it's a part of our history in this country, and it's still very much a part of our communities today. So I don't think it's going anywhere. Like you mentioned, that football might be more popular, but I'm still down for going to a baseball game and getting peanuts and throwing shells on the floor. It's fun. It's just a fun thing to do.
Adam (21:36)
It could be that I'm just too much of a baseball fan, but I've always been struck by just the history of baseball and the fact that of kind of our major sports. It goes back into the Civil War. You had both sides playing kind of a baseball game and using the Knickerbocker rules. Up until the 20th century, baseball was with us through this kind of heavily transformative period, this post-civil war period into the 20th century. First World War, Second World War, players went off to war, the civil rights movement. It's been there at kind of every step of the way. And maybe I've got it wrong. Maybe if I was passionate about football, I could kind of say no. There's a parallel here, but I've always kind of felt like baseball's been there longer, kind of woven into the American tapestry. And so it sort of has the cachet with us where it's been there long enough that it is kind of part of our identity, at least for a lot of Americans.
Dr. Cannato (22:41)
Yeah. There's no other sport that's like that. Football. Professional football really goes back to the 50s, mostly College football goes back a little further. Basketball not as far. The other great sport in America, American history in the 19th century, in the early 20th century is boxing. Boxing and baseball were the two great American sports for a long time. People have forgotten about that. Hockey is pretty regional. Soccer is never caught on in the States, as it has in Europe.
Mary (23:14)
Adam, to go back to what you were saying about this idea of during the Civil War, both sides coming together to play a baseball game. I've never heard that story before. I love that. I think it again, it connects back to this idea of civics and teaching civics, which is what the Bill of Rights Institute is all about. And just this idea that you can reach across the aisle and find a commonality with someone if they don't have the same views as you. And that can mean politically, but it also means, like informally, right. Baseball is not politics, or maybe it is politics. Maybe that's a whole other conversation, but just this idea that, again, sports as a unifier as a building. So we talk about having our President, Dr. David Bobb, talks about eat your vegetable civics, just this idea of sort of shoving civics down someone's throat. But there's also civics that is informal, that's maybe like pizza civics or chips civics, where it's sports. It's still associating with other people in society and having these rivalries and having these competitions. But it's all in the sense of building a community, of building this fabric.
Mary (24:23)
So I think that's maybe that's a good way to end our discussion. So thank you both so much. Adam Cushing and Dr. Vincent Cannato for being with us today. I know I learned a lot. I'm really excited to talk to my husband. He probably knows all of these things anyway, but I certainly learned a lot about baseball and listeners. I hope you all learned something as well. If you have any comments on this episode or future episodes, please write to us at comments@fabricofhistory.org and you can find us on all the social media places. We'd love to hear from you. And until next time, everyone keep asking questions.
Intro/Outro (25:07)
The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exists in a free society. Check out our educational resources and programs on our website. Mybri.org any questions or suggestions for future episodes? We'd love to hear from you. Just email us at comments@fabricofhistory.org and don't forget to visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay connected and informed about future episodes. Thank you for listening.