Whatever your plans for Sunday, stop in the name of the law. Unless it involves churchly endeavors, your agenda may well have been prohibited about 100 years ago.
And especially if it involved baseball.
In the whimsically titled “Bat, Ball & Bible,” Cortland State Prof. Charles DeMotte seriously chronicles the quest to keep the national pastime on a six-day schedule in the Empire State.
He’s not kidding, folks. On Aug. 6, 1893, the Buffalo Bisons sought to avoid prosecution by playing a Sunday game on virtually uninhabited Grand Island, transporting the fandom by steamship. There weren’t enough spectators to today fill a No. 40 bus and while the Herd beat Binghamton, 12-4, it lost a bundle; for baseball on Grand Island, it was one and done.
Prof. DeMotte does not include this misadventure, although he does reference the late Bison historian Joe Overfield. “BB&B” chronicles club owners’ schemes to escape the rundown of the law. Some would schedule a ballpark church service, pass the collection plate a couple of times and then offer the game for free. Others offered free admission but mandated purchase of a scorecard.
Even Ernie Banks couldn’t have played two under those conditions.
The point the professor makes is that it all reeked of hypocrisy. Before artificial lighting and a five-day work week, Sunday offered blue collars their only shot at baseball attendance. Yet pursuits of the privileged, such as golf, tennis and boating, continued with impunity. To Prof. DeMotte, that added the insult of mandated activities to the injury of a long week at the grindstone.
While he doesn’t belabor the point, the author also suggests the so-called “blue laws” as a means of keeping the workers in line – in church, where most of the clergy would preach a work ethic, as opposed to the ballpark, where they might actually get to exchanging gripes and come to the realization that they were being badly used by their employers.
Not all the faithful lobbied against Sunday baseball. A movement called Muscular Christianity preached that the lessons learned in keeping fit for competition were almost as vital as those acquired in the sanctuary.
One “compromise” proposed limiting Sunday baseball to a three-hour time slot. That sure would pinch today’s Yankees. One judge dismissed charges, saying the game in question was so badly played that it didn’t even qualify as baseball. In Buffalo, a priest changed Mass hours so as to accommodate ballgame attendance, declaring that God was in the sunshine as well as the church.
Prof. DeMotte fairly compares the debate to such modern issues as, for example, same-sex marriage, with base-playing of a political sort.
While scholarly, with enough footnotes for a novelette, “BBB” reads well, grammatically pristine, with such detail that an obsessive editor starts looking for insignificant errors just to prove that he’s paying attention. Rocket Man found only a team missing in a long-ago International League, Washington misplaced to the National League in 1906 and a misspelling of Chautauqua .
By today’s standards, that’s practically a perfect game, any day of the week.
Fire back to Rocket Man via pollyndoug@hotmail.com
Leave a Reply