Baseball’s Bounce Through the American Founding

As the Dodgers continue their march toward a World Series three-peat during America’s 250th year, it’s worth revisiting the relationship between baseball and the American Founding. It begins, surprisingly, with the king we tossed out.

In “The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III” the British historian Andrew Roberts notes that in 1748 Lady Hervey, a courtier and letter writer in the Prince of Wales’ circle, saw the young Prince George and his siblings playing “at baseball.” It was an English cousin of rounders, she wrote, that all schoolboys knew. Roberts can’t help but note that George III played it while George Washington did not.

Our American George, however, was no sports-avoiding stiff. As Steve Rushin  recently recounted in Sports Illustrated, the painter Charles Willson Peale recalled a day in 1773 when, “One afternoon several young gentlemen, visitors at Mount Vernon, and myself were engaged in pitching the bar, one of the athletic sports common in those days, when suddenly [Washington] appeared among us. He requested to be shown the pegs that marked the bounds of our efforts; then, smiling, and without putting off his coat, held out his hand for the missile. No sooner … did the heavy iron bar feel the grasp of his mighty hand than it lost the power of gravitation, and whizzed through the air, striking the ground far, very far, beyond our utmost limits. We were indeed amazed, as we stood around, all stripped to the buff, with shirt sleeves rolled up, and having thought ourselves very clever fellows.”

Having set the new record, Washington took his leave, but only after needling his vanquished competitors. “When you beat my pitch, young gentlemen,” he said, “I’ll try again.”

Washington, being well familiar with athletic pursuits, was wary of sports, and sports betting, distracting his fighting forces. In October 1775, he ordered that any soldier caught gambling be confined and punished, though he insisted he had no wish to discourage exercise and recreation.

Washington had reason to worry. The war, as wars do, involved long stretches of down time, and the men filled them with games. Abigail Adams complained to John in 1777 that the Continental Congress had paid thousands of men to loiter about “playing foot-ball and nine-pins” when they should have been defending the forts. Nathan Hale, a year before the British hanged him, jotted in his diary that he’d cleaned his gun and played some football.

As Sally Jenkins noted in The Atlantic, the American affinity for athletics goes back even further than the Founding era. “Long before the war for independence began,” she wrote, “colonists played with a streak of exploratory defiance, rebelling against the constraints of their own Puritan governors. The first mention of an athletic contest in colonial America comes from the separatist Pilgrim leader William Bradford, whose journal records that in 1621 — just a year after the Mayflower landed — he disciplined a group of young men for evading work on Christmas to instead engage in games such as ‘pitching the bar’ a contest to see who could throw a heavy rod the farthest.” Our “rebellious, rambunctious approach to athletic endeavor,” Jenkins offers, became part of the American ethos. “American sports,” she concludes, “were initially cultivated by men with foaming seas at their back and seemingly endless forests in front of them, who had an instinct to swat something—hard enough to sail over rail fences and into that unending wood.”

The presidency has become associated with “America’s pastime” for well over a century. When William Howard Taft threw out the first ceremonial pitch for the Washington Senators in 1910, it inspired sportswriter Charles Dryden to humorously paraphrase a famous eulogy for the first president: “First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” To offer comfort across the country almost 100 years later, George W. Bush threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium in October of 2001, just a few weeks after 9/11.

Nowadays, the Washington Nationals send giant-headed Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt racing around the warning track every fourth inning, and Teddy once went 525 races without a win, which made national news. Jefferson, who scorned “games played with the ball,” now sprints as a bobblehead for the amusement of a beer-soaked crowd.

In 1790, Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport that the government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Freedom from fear also expands the boundaries of who can participate in the field. The Dodgers, the team that brought Jackie Robinson to the major leagues in 1947 as the first black player, also employed Sandy Koufax, who in 1965 sat out Game 1 of the World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. The 90-year-old legend can be spotted watching proudly in Dodger Stadium to this day.

For all sports fans, Rushin notes, the Revolutionary War and the freedom it ensured for us all still resounds, “echoing ever so faintly, anytime the Yankees take on the Royals, or the 76ers face down the Kings.” Washington might have pitched a bar and never a baseball, but he would be mighty proud of today’s players.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives at Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include the newly released “Jewish Roots of American Liberty,” “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”