As a partner to “Throwback Thursday”…
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I hauled out this article I wrote for Irish America magazine some 13 years ago on the influence that community had on the national pastime.
Irish ballplayers have helped to shape baseball ever since the game took its first foundering steps on the playing fields of New York and New Jersey over 150 years ago. Their impact is still felt. While no official organ of the game keeps records of ethnicity, one only has to glance through one of the massive reference works, such as Total Baseball, to peruse the scores of Irish surnames that fill the players’ register.
Baseball was originally invented with middle and upper-class professionals in mind, a gentleman’s game and bonding ritual. But it wasn’t too long before testosterone took over and winning these games became the priority. “Ringers” — highly skilled (and surreptitiously paid) athletes outside the intended social circle — began to infiltrate ball clubs. Eventually, the façade of amateurism made way to the first professional teams, beginning with the Cincinnati Reds in 1869.
Baseball historian David Q. Voigt, in his opus America Through Baseball, writes that the game was “a primary vehicle of assimilation for immigrants into American society and a stepping stone for groups such as Irish-Americans…” In fact, that Irish influx helped create an anti-English backlash that reduced the popularity of cricket in the U.S. and helped solidify baseball as the “national game.”
You can read the whole article here.
And, of course, baseball’s “theme song,” aka “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is set in Irish roots with the star of the song named Katie Casey (or, perhaps less famous, Nellie Kelly).
Okay, let me stop here before I fall down a rabbit hole whence I might never return.
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