Baseball reflects America,
for better or for worse

Steve Morano
MSMU Class of 2024

(3/2023) Baseball has been and always will be intertwined with America. It has been foundational in the modern history of our country, for better and for worse. But it reflects the emotions, movements and pacing of us as a society and how we see ourselves as Americans. Whether it intended to be or not, baseball is a bright mirror to our own national consciousness, its virtues and defects.

100 years ago, at the beginning of the Prohibition Era, when organized crime thrived in many American cities, not even baseball could escape its corruption. Eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox were permanently banned from baseball for fixing the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds as Arnold Rothstein, a crime boss from New York, had paid them to throw the series. Some players admitted to the ruse, but others, like "Shoeless" Joe Jackson retained the narrative that even though they had taken money, it didn’t affect their play during the championship series. This scandal kept many of these players from making a living and some from the Hall of Fame. Like many other American endeavors at this time, crime had corrupted the national pastime.

Baseball has also reflected how Americans viewed safety in an increasingly industrial world. At a time when presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson were challenging monopolized industry based on their safety and economic practices, baseball went through a progressive phase. In 1914, the Federal League was founded and started to pay ballplayers higher wages than their counterpart associations. The owners of Federal League clubs eventually brought an anti-trust suit against the owners of National and American League clubs, claiming they had a monopoly on the game. Nothing ever came of the original lawsuit, but this eventually led to the MLB being exempt from anti-trust laws, giving it that monopoly over the game that Federal League owners claimed. The Federal League folded after the 1915 season.

In both World Wars, millions of American men were drafted into the armed forces to fight in Europe and the Pacific. The National and American League never suspended play during those two respective conflicts, but the players themselves were not exempt from the draft; many players fought gallantly in the Armed services, such as Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Matthewson.

During World War II, thousands of Japanese Americans, German Americans and Italian Americans were arrested and placed in internment camps, as they were seen by the government as potentially loyal to Axis countries. Even while relatives were arrested based on their ethnicity, many men from these backgrounds served gallantly in the armed forces. The 442nd Infantry Regiment is the most decorated unit in U.S. military history, fighting heroically in Italy during 1943 and 1944; twenty-one of its members received the Medal of Honor. This unit was exclusively made up of Japanese Americans, many of whom had family members in internment camps. The Sicilian son of a San Francisco fisherman also experienced what many of the members of the 442nd had when it came to ethnic profiling by the government. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1943 even after his parents were interned for being suspected as enemy aliens. A couple of months before his parents were arrested, this baseball player set the record at 56 for most hits in consecutive games; this man was Joe DiMaggio.

In Brooklyn in 1945, Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager Branch Rickey signed the Kansas City Monarchs shortstop Jackie Robinson to a minor league contact. Soon after, Robinson was playing for the club’s minor league affiliate, the Montreal Royals, and within two years, on April 15, 1947, Robinson started at first base for the Dodgers in a 5-3 win against the Boston Braves. He was the first African American ballplayer to play in organized white baseball since Moses Fleetwood Walker in 1885, breaking the long-established color barrier imposed by the owners of major league ball clubs. Almost a decade later, the modern civil rights movement began in the United States, spurred on by the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others who were fighting for their rights guaranteed by the constitution.

Hall of Famer Buck O’Neil, who himself played for the Kansas City Monarch in the 1940’s alongside Robinson, helped found the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Among baseball historians, O’Neil is considered one of the most important historians of the game, as many of the players and stories of the Negro Leagues would have been lost to the past without him. O’Neil cited the signing of Robinson as the start of the modern civil rights movement in the United States, ten years before the recognized beginning of the movement. While Robinson made his debut in Brooklyn, Martin Luther King Jr. was a senior at Morehouse College in Atlanta. The two never crossed paths at the time, even though later in his life, Robinson would advocate for the civil rights movement. As integration in Baseball started to become more ever present with the likes of Larry Doby, Hank Thompson and Willard Brown, the civil rights movement as we know it today was just about to start. In the decade or so after integration, the movement ramped up with crucial events that lead to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the eventual inclusion of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution.

The 1990’s saw political tensions that eventually culminated in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Baseball also went through scandal during that time. In 1994, players went on strike, citing problems with club ownership. This culminated in the World Series being canceled for that year, the first time it hadn’t been played since 1904. Eventually, a new Collective Bargaining Agreement between the Players Union and the league was reached, but the damage had been done. The ultimate victim of this, like many with the Clinton Lewinsky scandal, was the people. Fan attendance dropped, and it took famous moments like Cal Ripken Jr. breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played record to save baseball.

Today, as the 2023 MLB season arrives, new rules, such as pitch clocks and bigger bases to ensure player safety, are all meant to be enforced in the upcoming season. This is in an attempt to shorten the game times, which in recent decades have exploded, resulting in some games coming to three or so hours per nine innings. Baseball purists will cite the fact that the game has always been a limitless affair, where time does not intercede from players on the field trying to score runs and get people out, no matter how long it takes. Others believe that the game has slowed to the point where Americans would rather watch something like football or basketball, where a clock governs the movements of a game, not the players.

The United States will always be in a constant state of flux, and so will baseball. In the 150+ years of professional baseball, crime syndicates have taken control of the game, the welfare of the players have been exploited and then protected, players have served their country in times of need, and people have been locked out of playing the game simply because of the color of their skin—only to then blow the leagues away with talent. Baseball always reflects our country’s feelings; it shows us when we are doing bad, but it also shows us when we do good. When baseball is in conflict, it can show us how we, as a people, can change for the better.