musings on mo'ne and the historically "urban" sport called baseball

Mo'ne Davis, star Little League pitcher

Where have I been? I only learned about Mo'ne Davis, a star Little League pitcher yesterday. Her accomplishments have gotten me more excited than ever about our field trip to Rickwood Field in Birmingham. UA's Dr. Richard Megraw, scholar of baseball and other American matters, will oversee our visit with Dr. John Beeler, a UA historian and baseball enthusiast, also in tow.The class will travel there on September 27 to learn about the Birmingham Barons, a minor league baseball team, but also about how baseball figures into the emergence of urban life.

I have to admit baseball moves a little too slow for me. As a spectator, I love the energy of football and basketball more. I say this even though I can be found walking around campus wearing a New York Yankees cap in honor of my Mississippi-born, former sharecropping grandfather who - egads! - loved both the Yankees and the New York Jets.

With Mo'ne now front and center in the public's imagination, I will be more attentive. Certainly her name came up this morning in an National Public Radio wrap-up on sports. She also made the New York Times. It was interesting to see how so many of the readers made more of her skill and gender in the comment section than her race (I cautiously think that's progress). The NPR piece tackles race, however, especially as it relates to how economics figures into who gets to  and who doesn't get to play little league sports,which sometimes involves more money for travel and uniforms than low-income families have.

For me, such a topic brought the story of baseball full circle. Unlike football, which began with Ivy League schools, baseball was initially a product of the the urban space (this, too, is quite interesting as the diamond evokes a "pastoral setting," as Gunter Barth writes). As aristocrats turned to horse racing and cricket, mid-nineteenth century working class men turned to this sport to get away from their daily routines in an industrializing and urbanizing America. Race, ethnic and class divisions became more evident as baseball grew in popularity. By the 1890s, there was a growing interest in not just this sport, but other ones. Throughout it all, people built for a moment, if not a lifetime, a sense of community. We will learn more about the idea of community in the urban space via baseball and other things that transformed small town American life in the coming weeks. There will also be room to reflect on how the idea of what it means to be "urban" has changed across time. I  mean, Thomas Jefferson, one of the "Founding Fathers," saw America's future not in cities, but on the countrysides. When did cities become significant spaces in the United States? What leads to their decline and for some, a seeming revival? How do race, ethnicity, class and gender figure into the answers to such questions?

Finally, we will want to be curious about how baseball history seems to slip unnoticed into everyday life. In an earlier blog post, I certainly mentioned how one of my favorite scenes in the movie Love and Basketball finds a young man (Omar Epps) jokingly asking his future basketball-playing girlfriend (Sanaa Lathan) if she's taking "Spalding" to the spring dance. Spalding, the name on her basketball, is none other than A.G. Spalding, nineteenth century pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings and  Chicago White Stockings and later, a businessman.

 Baseball player A.G. Spalding went on to become a businessman.

what baseball has to teach us about city life

I know very little about baseball, but was intrigued to learn that it is a sport that we can look at to learn more about the beginnings of city life in the United States.  In his book City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Gunther Barth tells us that in the 1840s a group of "New York gentlemen" spent their "sunny days" playing ball on one Madison Avenue corner. As ball clubs sprung up in New York, Brooklyn and other cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, the everyday man became fascinated, needing a distraction from work life. The earlier development of newspapers drew more attention to the sport, which is actually a descendant of British ball games, one of them dating back to the 1700s. Spectators welcomed hearing stats. Rules eventually governed this game just as they had governed what happened outside of ballparks.This morning, NPR had a great story about the Birmingham Barons breaking the racial divide in baseball in the early 1960s. It is worth listening to in order to learn more about a sport that became big business although always one about which the public has had some say. Think about what umpires often hear. I don't even want to share what I once heard in the stands at a Cubs game. This semester, students enrolled in this course will learn more about this game as we make discoveries about American culture and the story of the nineteenth century city. Baseball fan and scholar Dr. Richard Megraw of Alabama's American Studies Department will join us September 11 as we explore this topic.