Sunday Baseball: The Major Leagues' Struggle to Play Baseball on the Lord's Day, 1876–1934 (review)

The problem writers face in putting together a complicated collection of facts and anecdotes is a familiar one: how to give just enough detail to make it interesting, but not so much that it bores to tears. I have written book chapters that were barely readable because they were crammed with details; sifting out the chaff filled many footnotes. Let those interested in all the details go to the back of the book and look them up.

Which brings me to Sunday Baseball—no, not Jon Miller's gig with Joe Morgan—the book by Charlie Bevis. It took me a month of Sundays to plod through this book, yet I recommend it, despite all the details. Skim. Bevis needed a good editor to make his research easier to digest, but it's still a hearty meal.

Readers travel through six decades of time, stopping for long pauses in city after city, watching a kind of weird drama unfold in each section of the country. We are so used to Sunday games that we probably don't realize that there was a struggle, fought over and over again in city after city, to play ball on Sunday without fear of arrest.

And that's the problem; the fight is always the same. Teams play games, arrests are made, fines are paid, sometimes lawsuits are filed. Teams back off, or city fathers back off, but eventually the teams win, and we know the endings of each story because no one gets arrested anymore. The detail is fascinating, but it also smacks of Yogi's "déjà vu all over again."

We have also long forgotten that Sunday, once upon a time, was the weekend—most folks worked on Saturdays—and Sundays were not days of shopping and frivolity, but days of rest. For strict interpreters, that meant ballplayers, too. And the games might be noisy, disturbing the preacher down the street.

But Sunday games translated to bigger crowds, from day one (no pun intended). Baseball itself struggled to survive for much of its first century, so Sunday games became, for some teams, literally a matter of life and death—no Sunday income, and this team is outta here. In Philadelphia, planted in a state that was the last outpost of resistance, the climax of the battle came when Connie Mack was forced to sell off his second dynasty, the toast of 1929–33, before the last Sabbatarian fortress fell.

It's an amazing and worthwhile story, and readers learn much more about America, I think, than about baseball. The documentation is dazzling if slightly overwhelming. Ultimately, it's fun to read about leagues when there were real rivalries and about a time in this country when basic values were still being sorted out—when cities were not so secular and fans argued in good faith about issues so much different than today's.