I collaborated with Charles Fetherolf on a short story about the origins of DC baseball for Fulcrum Press’ upcoming District Comics. District Comics is an anthology edited by Matt Dembicki (Trickster, Xoc) that aims to tell the alternative history of Washington DC. Stories about spies and the DC punk scene and, in our case, DC baseball.
Our story in centered on the first well-documented baseball road-trip. In 1867 the Washington Nationals embarked on a multi-city tour out west along with future Hall of Fame sportswriter Henry Chadwick. The Nationals won all but one game on the road-trip, often by wide margins (for example, they beat the Cincinnati Buckeyes 88-12). The road-trip is widely considered one of the most important events in the development of baseball as the National Pastime and I managed to find many write-ups and essays on the dominance of the DC club and the primary players who went on to shape what is now the Major Leagues.
When I went to the primary sources, however, spending days at the Library of Congress searching for the actual dispatches published in the Washington Star, I got a different perspective on the road-trip, one that wasn’t really addressed in the literature to date.
Baseball players, up until this point, were considered to be nothing but ruffians and drunkards. The amount of real estate in the Star that was dedicated to Chadwick’s dispatches was small, at first. The article announcing the Nationals’ departure read:
Departure of the National Base Ball Club - The first nine of the National Base Ball Club of this city left yesterday afternoon, in the 4:30 train, for their Western trip, having accepted challenges to play the crack clubs in several Western cities. They will reach Columbus this evening, and to-morrow will have a game with the Capital club of that city. The players are: Wright, Williams, Fletcher, Parker, Fox, Smith, Studley, Herthrong, McLean, Norton, Hodges, Robinson, Jones, Patterson, and James, with Mr. Munson as scorer. They are accompanied by Mr. Henry Chadwick, reporter for Willies’ Spirit and the Sunday Mercury.
The article announcing the aforementioned crushing of the Buckeyes read:
Another Victory for the National - At a match game of base ball, played yesterday afternoon, between the “Nationals” of Washington and the “Buckeyes” of Cincinnati, in that city, the former scored 88 to the latter’s 12.
And then there was scandal, and the amount of newspaper real estate dedicated to the road-trip grew exponentially:
The “Nationals” at Chicago - How they got Defeated ”Just Once” - We are permitted to make the following interesting extracts from a letter received in this city from one of the Nationals nine. It explains satisfactorily how the crack club was momentarily checked in its veni, vidi, vici, career at Chicago, and was defeated “just once.” We may say in talk connection that the absurd story put forth in the New York Herald to the effect that the Nationals played possum in the game with the Rockford Club, in order to get bets on their next game with the crack club of the West, the Chicago “Excelsior,” has not a particle of foundation. The members of the National are, one and all, gentlemen of too much character to entertain for a moment the idea of selling out a game. They have played to win from the start, and it is well known that their friends in this city have backed them in bets to the amount of not less than $25,000, to win every game on their trip.
The paper then publishes a letter from a player to his father, explaining the factors (weather, sickness, etc) that led to the Nationals losing. From this moment on, the Star’s reports were all about the Strength of Character of this Nationals team, the banquets hosted in their honor, and arguing against the ongoing accusation from New York and Chicago papers that the Nationals threw the game in order to make money on the bets.
And it hit me - the story isn’t really about the Nationals. It’s about Washington DC and money and individuals who were trying to bolster the sport and turn it into the National Pastime. And that’s what we focused on in our story. It’s not about the Glory of Baseball, it’s about what it means to become a National Pastime in a Nation that just fought a Civil War, that is undergoing Reconstruction, that is having entire power structures destroyed and rebuilt, and that is slowly becoming a World Power.
We throw around the phrase National Pastime without ever considering the negative connotation associated with the term “National.”
The final shot of the story shows two teams playing on the National Mall. In the background is the half-built Washington Monument. Extending beyond this story, we have the explosive growth of a nation paralleled against the explosive growth of a sport. Battles were fought on the baseball field beyond bat and ball. The women in Vassar playing baseball against the Victorian ideal, Moses Fleetwood Walker becoming the last professional African American ballplayer of the 19th century and Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier early in the Civil Rights movement, the league that started in the Japanese Internment camps, death row inmates getting stays of execution in order to pitch in prison leagues…baseball has an ugly history that parallels the birth pangs of America, and it all started when a bunch of ruffians went out west that maybe made some bets on a game that was getting national attention.
The book is scheduled to come out in September. I’ll update with more info as the release date nears.
