The American Game: Baseball and Ethnicity (review)

In the recently concluded American League Pennant Championships and consequent World Series, which sent Red Sox Nation citizens into rhapsody and exultation, it was apparent that much of the core strength of each team involved, including, of course, the Bosox, capitalized greatly on the skills and brilliance of those individuals that might be termed ethnic individuals. There can be little argument that baseball's modern times demonstrate a demographic that illustrates, and indeed underscores, that players from across the world are now part and parcel of the contemporary Major League baseball scene. In a relatively new book, The American Game: Baseball and Ethnicity, the result of these unfolding evolutionary circumstances is placed front and center for our examination.

In The American Game professor Lawrence Baldassaro and sports curator Richard Johnson bring us a collection of nine essays about baseball and ethnicity—or are they really essays about ethnicity and baseball? The stitching is so closely entwined that it is difficult to tell which thread overlaps the other. In fairness to the editors they leave the answer to that question, if indeed it is a valid one, to the reader. Either way, the essays, taken as a single body of work, leave little doubt about the importance of ethnic presence and personality and its signature on America's national pastime. Baseball is an American game, born and bred, and as such it personifies, perhaps more than any other game in American culture, the content of American history and heritage as well as demographic ethnicity.

Aficionados of baseball history are familiar with the often-quoted dictum of Jacques Barzun, noted American social commentator, who many years ago claimed that "if one wanted to know America, they had better know baseball," or words to the same effect. The same dictum, with a twist, might be applied to the literally millions and millions of immigrants who came to America well before the time of Barzun's proclamation. The "twist" might read: "If you want to assimilate in America, play baseball." And so they did—Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs, Latin Americans and, finally, Asians.¹ Add to this mix the African American baseball experience, one that progressed from the late nineteenth century until almost the mid–twentieth century in segregated perspective and then finally in integration with post–World War II Major League America. This "twist" is not mere theory; it is fact. It is not, we think, a simply romanticized vision of circumstances. After all, we observed it firsthand as lived by "ethnic types" with, and against, whom we competed during our own boyhood over half a century ago. To this point we shall return at the end of this review.

To examine baseball history is to follow a systematic trail of development, prominence, and in some cases even dominance, all laid down in neat chronological order by specific groups of Americans. First in this saga, of course, are English folks. After all, bat-and-ball games arrived in the cultural baggage of children who, with their parents, helped to colonize the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1620.² Over the years the game was modified to suit young adults. It followed, therefore, that most of the participants and critical developmental personalities in American baseball history, both before and immediately after the evolution of the professional game in the middle 1870s, were people with English ethnic names, including such important personalities as Cartwright, Chadwick, Spaulding, Adams, and Montgomery Ward. In The American Game this aspect is addressed in an important essay entitled "The Many Fathers of Baseball," written by Frederick Ivor-Campbell, an American of Scots heritage who has twice served as vice president of that huge but august body of people who study baseball the most intently, the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR). Ivor-Campbell's essay traces the tale of the game's origin and evolution toward modernity as well as the people who made...