Still, the present image of major league baseball tied to huge endorsement commitments, anchored to major TV advertising and gargantuan player salaries was not the idea of Union Civil War hero Abner Doubleday when he championed the game into a national pastime.
Contrary to popular opinion, Doubleday had nothing to do with inventing the game of baseball. He instead used his military and social status to promote a game that had long existed on a small, shadowy level in America called “rounders.” Like cricket, rounders was an English imported game that involved batting a ball to be lost among the fielders and scoring around fixed bases
But rounders was not as genteel and as properly English as cricket. Rounders instead was rougher and more robust, better suited to the rougher and more robust Americans.
Still, compared to fighting a terrible Civil War, playing a game of rounders in post- bellum America was becoming an idyllic community and family experience. So Doubleday with his high-society standing helped change rounders into baseball. He also championed the creation of baseball teams in every town, even the smallest towns and townships.
Baseball pride
Surely Doubleday would have Stevenson Ranch, Valencia, Newhall, Saugus, Canyon Country and Val Verde each with a proud adult baseball team to help focus their summers.
For decades in fact, most of the townships in the Santa Clarity Valley have had their adult summer baseball in the forms of American Legion teams. To be technical, the composition of these American Legion teams fall a bit short of being “adult.” Most of these players can be found playing high school baseball in the spring.
But the good physically developed teams of the American Legion help us to enjoy the games without the protective parent restrictions of Little League baseball. In my experience of watching Little League games in Santa Clarita, for example, I have never been able to free myself from the role of protective father. Then I noticed all the other protective parents sweltering through the same process,
Fortunately, though, American Legion baseball has been adult enough and detached enough to allow us spectators to simply be baseball fans.
My point is that when Abner Doubleday championed baseball into a pastoral post-bellum pastime, he also helped our American families get through the summer in one solid piece.
In fact, there may be no other summer pastime that has encouraged an American family to so leisurely talk together and bond together as does live baseball. For this reason, live baseball in every American town really did help create a greatest bonding generation that help bring down Hitler and the Great Depression.
Nor I think is there any structured date with a single man and a single woman – or a married date with husband and wife – better suited to promote conversation and bonding than through all the down time and the pregnant pauses of a live baseball game.
Probably the mellowness of baseball is simply due to the fact that unlike any other major sport, there is no pressing game clock to drive anyone on site into a panic. Instead, this American game with its Star-Spangled Banner often seems too neat and logical for our raggedy world. No wonder that this game has been defined by legendary New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra as something close to life, which like baseball ain’t over ‘til it’s over.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California..” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.
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