Star-Spangled Baseball: True Tales of Flags and Fields

By James Breig

In the aftermath of the Civil War, two all-American things -- flags and baseball -- became tied together as a means of reuniting the nation. From "The Star-Spangled Banner" to pennants marking a winning season, flags and the sport have been entwined for 150 years. "Star-Spangled Baseball" shares stories about how the old game and Old Glory came together to link patriotism and hardball.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483520445

Book preview

9781483520445

First Inning

Baseball and Flag-Mania

On a mid-June day in 1939, thousands of baseball fans – called cranks in earlier days of the game – crowded into Cooperstown, a small hamlet in the middle of New York State. The occasion was the official opening of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

As part of the pageantry, area children portrayed the sport’s bygone days, and 32 major league stars, including Dizzy Dean, Lloyd Waner, Mel Ott and Hank Greenburg, eased through an exhibition game at nearby Doubleday Field. Even Babe Ruth, retired and two score and four years old, stepped to the plate – and popped out. The Sultan of Swat was among the legendary athletes who comprised the first inductees into the hall, along with Honus Wagner and Ty Cobb.

The commissioner of baseball, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, declared the hall open with a prayerful wish: May it forever stand as a symbol of clean play and good sportsmanship.

With that, an American Legion band struck up The Star-Spangled Banner, which echoed in the rural town a fly ball away from legendary Glimmerglass Lake. The anthem had become the musical fanfare to baseball, as familiar as the opening theme to Gone With the Wind would become when it was released later in the year.

The debut of the museum marked a seminal moment in baseball’s history – and lore. The facility was seated in Cooperstown as part of the legend that Abner Doubleday, who lived nearby and shone as an officer during the Civil War, had created baseball there from nothing. Thus, the link between the game and national unity – was strengthened by a myth.

What is true – and still reflected in the use of the National Anthem at the opening of every game – is that the blast furnace of the Civil War welded together two all-American things: baseball and flags.

The conflict had given rise to flag-mania, the fervent drive to outwardly express feelings of deep-seated patriotism through the display of the American flag. Almost any excuse, such as troops passing through a town, caused people to hang Old Glory out their windows.

The New York Post wrote in 1861 that some enterprising individual has flown a kite from which was spread a very large and beautiful flag, waving gracefully above the ground. A year later, another newspaper said that the North has suddenly transfused into [the flag] a symbolism of loyalty….The flag-mania in New York has been one of the wildest conceivable.

The War Between the States also matured the game that had been fostered on farms and city lots. From 1861 to 1865, soldiers who were assembled from precincts unknown to one another found commonality in baseball. After the war, that cohesion would help to reunite the North and the South – and cement the sport’s image as America’s pastime. An assessment in 1880 affirmed that in 1865, baseball began to regain its popularity and to be studied as a profession by many who devoted to it their whole time and energy.

An 1891 article reviewing the sport’s history remarked that even the great war of the rebellion could not push [baseball] into oblivion, let alone a brotherhood faction. As baseball historian John Thorn has written, the game was a civilizing force,…a social leveler and, in its paradigm of bleacher democracy, an agent for healing the nation’s divisions of feeling.

During the war, other sorts of flags were essential amid the smoke, noise and horror of battle. Regimental standards, designed back home and sewn by mothers and wives, acted as guides for troops, leading them to the right spot to fight, rallying them to a common point when chaos dispersed them and signaling retreat. They showed the way to home base, and were pylons of safety amid the fiery jumble of bullets, crazed horses and hellish cries of pain.

A cover of Puck magazine from 1913 captures the connection between baseball and the Civil War through an image of two veterans – one Union and one Confederate – heading together to the box office