In that same year, Super Bowl XX took place between the Chicago Bears and the New England Patriots, and that garnered over 90 million TV viewers. So perhaps the moniker of America’s favorite pastime isn’t exactly accurate.
Baseball is up there with apple pie when thinking about things that are painfully American. So I figure it’s the perfect thing to learn about if I am trying to integrate myself into this country, right?
When a movie wants us to know that there’s a good relationship between a father and son, we watch them catch a ball together, and nothing quite brings a tear to a bald eagle’s eye like an old fashioned baseball movie.
Though it has notoriously low television ratings, it’s a sport with absurdly loyal fans and is nationally revered as wholesome family fun. This is despite my short stint in the baseball capital of America, Boston, being punctuated by people yelling “Yankee’s suck” at a late train.
So as someone who knows very little about baseball and frankly doesn’t even enjoy it that much, let me tell you about America’s pastime.
It gained this nickname in the 1920s when large stadiums were constructed for the sport, and radio and newspaper coverage began to popularize it with the American public. As all of the best American things are, it was derived from English pastimes.
This includes cricket as well as a children’s game called rounders. While it is likely that there were other influences as well, such as (the not very fun sounding) stool ball, goal ball or poison ball, these two have been the most directly correlated.
And like the creation of most other national sports, it was really the rules that created the game. Alexander Joy Cartwright, one of the founders of the New York Knickerbockers baseball club, wrote down the official rules that would eventually evolve into the game that is played today.
And weirdly enough, the sport has had a surprisingly long and controversial history with social progressiveness.
This includes having women play during World War II, because men were taken to the front lines. Another example was when brothers Moses Fleetwood and Weldy Walker became the first African Americans to play on a major league team in 1884.
However this lasted for only for a year before they were unceremoniously dropped from the roster. After this, it would be over 60 years before Jackie Robinson famously joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and went on to win the Rookie of the Year Award.
Now it would be hard to have a baseball article without talking about Babe Ruth (particularly when he is the only player you’ve actually heard of). So who is he and why does he get his own candy bar?
George Herman Ruth Jr., also known as Babe Ruth, not only championed the style of baseball that included having a home run hitter within the line-up but also kick-started the bitter rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.
In 1927, he would hit an unprecedented 60 home runs in a season, a record which would go undefeated until 1961, when another New York Yankee, Roger Maris, managed 61 home runs.
Perhaps giving up their star player wasn’t such a smart idea on the Sox’s part, as it would take another 86 years for the Red Sox to win another world series.
This was despite being one of the most successful professional baseball teams around. The trade would come to be known as the Curse of the Bambino (another of Ruth’s nickname’s). It became the fodder for the bitter rivalry made fun of by every city other than New York and Boston.
It was Babe Ruth’s success that most likely spurred the candy bar offshoot, though the Curtiss Candy Company would claim that it was actually named after Ruth Cleveland, daughter of president Grover Cleveland and nicknamed Baby Ruth by the press. Of course, this was in 1891, and she would be dead by the time the candy came out, but I’m sure that is just a coincidence.
So there you go. These are the important things to know about baseball and more importantly what it means to be an American.
While I for one would still never choose to have a conversation about the sport, at least now I might be able to fake my way through one... As long as they don’t expect me to know any specifics about current players, events or rules.
