Our nation’s 250th birthday will soon be upon us, and the president has correctly decided to commemorate it with much pomp and circumstance.
But you can’t tell the story of America without telling the story of baseball.
Unlike the NFL or the NBA, baseball, or at least that terminology, is older than the country itself.
The word base-ball can be found in John Newbery’s children’s book A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, written in 1744, a full generation before the Declaration of Independence. Other references to bat-and-ball games in the mid-18th Century can be found in a 1749 British newspaper, which reported that Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, played a game called “Bass-Ball.”
Sadly, for ol’ Frederick, he would die only two years later after being “hit in the chest with a cricket ball which caused his lungs to explode, while more modern evidence suggests he likely died from a pulmonary embolism.”
But the game he played would live on and grow.
In 1778, soldiers at Valley Forge would pass the time by playing a game called “base.”
In 1845, if you’re inclined to believe this particular bit of lore, Alexander J. Cartwright organized the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, which played the game similar to the way others had played it before, like rounders. The Knickerbockers adopted a new and lasting rule requiring the runner to be put out by being tagged with the ball, rather than by being struck by it.
Less than 20 years later, the country would be at war with itself, but the game would be played by both sides during America’s Civil War, where it first became known as “America’s Pastime.”
Currier & Ives Illustration 19th Century. The American National Game of Base Ball. (Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
After the Civil War, the game served as a much-needed unifying force in a country in need of healing. Like the stitches on a baseball, the game helped heal the wounds of strife and division as men from North and South, East and West, played the game in growing numbers.
The National League, begun in 1876, was created before Reconstruction even officially ended. The American League would follow shortly after the turn of the century in 1901. During that time, America would be transformed from a largely rural, agrarian society to an increasingly urban, factory-based one.
The driving forces of that change would be providential and economic. Still, one of the main factors enabling cultures and regions that had heretofore been alienated or even at war with each other would be baseball. Allegiances to cities and regions shifted to sports teams instead of armies or politicians and would civilize and pacify us in a way that few at the time even realized. Channeling of our country’s traditional and passionate regionalism into a game, not a congress, legislature, courtroom, or battlefield, would prepare our country for the unified and cooperative efforts necessary to prevail through the Great Depression, the Spanish Flu, and two World Wars.
The American Dream itself, the ability for a man to rise from rags to riches and enjoy equal rights and treatment regardless of color, was exemplified and legalized in baseball in 1947, with the integration of Major League Baseball, before it was ever legalized, much less accepted, in America as a whole.
Brooklyn star Jackie Robinson (left) greets teammate Gil Hodges as the two meet at the Dodgers’ Vero Beach spring training camp in 1954. (Getty Images)
Baseball was played uninterrupted during World War II and became a focal point of our nation’s resurgence after 9/11.
The first athletic rite of passage for father and son is a baseball and a glove. Whether that child ever picks up a bat or another ball or glove ever again, that first moment with baseball is etched in time, because baseball is etched in time. The first recorded game took place in 1846, a full 45 years before basketball was invented and 16 or 23 years before the first football game in 1862 or 1869, depending on who you believe.
A president has thrown out the first pitch at Opening Day, the All-Star game, or the World Series every year since 1910. No other major American sports league can lay claim to that length and consistency of a run of participation from the nation’s chief executive.
New York Governor and presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt throws out a baseball at the last game of the 1932 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Yankees. To the right is his son James. To the left is Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. (Betttmann/Getty Images)
And when it was time to rally America after the worst terror attack in the history of our country, then-President George W. Bush didn’t pick an NFL game; he chose baseball.
“America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers,” said James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams. “It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time”
It’s been that way for 250 years, and if America is still here 250 years from now, so will baseball.
Dylan Gwinn is the Sports Editor for Breitbart News.