Before the Curse: The Chicago Cubs' Glory Years, 1870-1945

2. Baseball, Celebrated and Lampooned

2. Baseball, Celebrated and Lampooned Wit h no t imef r a me governing a baseball game’s length, playing fields that feature “bullpens” and fences, and a playing season in-step with that of planting and harvesting, symbolically and mythically baseball echoes America’s rural past. Yet baseball in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—especially professional baseball—was strongly urban. It represented, as Mark Twain put it, “the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.”1 Surprisingly, though, in 1881the New York Times—which sometimes showed support for baseball—ran a scathing op-ed about the sport, saving its choicest barbs for the professionals. The paper called on Americans to shun baseball and turn to the more refined game of cricket. The second article presented here, written in 1888 in Outing magazine, reflects how near the turn of the twentieth century baseball not only made Americans giddy, it could unite classes and represent America’s “verve.” In 1888 the industrial revolution roared and European immigrants came to America in droves. The two-year-old Statue of Liberty stood as a beacon of hope and Victorian mores were giving way to a more liberated cultural attitude . These changes brought their own issues, though, as cities with exploding populations like Chicago sometimes saw tensions arise and social problems multiply. Still, steam, steel, and electricity had already made significant inroads in changing how cities looked, felt, and functioned, and how people worked. Indeed, the increase in leisure time that came with the industrial revolution fueled the startling growth of professional baseball. This article shows that, through all the rapid changes in America, the National League managed to appeal to thousands upon thousands of Ameri- cans—Americans that reveled in baseball. We also get a glowing report on the evolution of baseball as a business and the ballplayer as a professional. This National Game New York Times, August 30, 1881 There is really reason to believe that baseball is gradually dying out in this country. It has been openly announced by an athletic authority that what was once called the national game is being steadily superseded by cricket, and the records of our hospitals confirm the theory that fewer games of baseball have been played during the past year than were played during any other single year since 1868. The history of the development of baseball is a curious and interesting one. It has existed in a rudimentary form in England ever since the latter part of the twelfth century, and it is believed that the young Plymouth Pilgrim played this inchoate game, then known as “rounders,” on Good Friday as a public protest against the Church of Rome. Undoubtedly the game of “rounders” was developed from the still older and simpler game of “two-oldcat .” The latter game, in the opinion of our best archaeologists, was invented by the Egyptians during the period of the Third Dynasty, and afterward introduced into Greece, whence it spread throughout the Mediterranean basin. It formed part of the Olympic games, and is believed to have been played by the Pythagorian neophytes as part of the initiation ceremony of the mysterious brotherhood founded by the great enemy of the bean school of philosophy—a school which was the forerunner and antitype of the modern Concord school. “Two-old-cat” has always held its place among the smallboys of all nations, and it is the germ whence all other games of ball in which “runs” are counted originate. Its extreme simplicity has prevented it from ever attaining the proud position of a national game, but it will always retain the reverence of ball-players as the primitive game of remote antiquity. About twenty-five years ago there was an effort made to induce Americans to play cricket, but it failed. We were not, at that time, worthy of the game, 18 f r om “l et ’s pl a y ba l l ” t o k ing k el l y and in our ignorance and indolence we said, “Give us something easier.” It was then that certain unknown persons resolved to take the old game of “rounders,” which had gradually become known by the name of baseball, and to make of it an easy substitute for cricket. To the latter game it bore much the same relation that the frivolous game of...