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Somewhere in unrecorded history, one of your
ancestors picked up a club and swatted a rock that had been hurled
at him. Or maybe your ancient clansman was the one doing the
chucking. Time will never tell us which. But history will suggest
that someone has been, if not playing base ball at least
practicing its skills since humans first stood erect in a crowd
and made an exhortation. And maybe, just maybe, that
exhortation was “Huzzah!”
Fanciful flights of anthropological theory
aside, we do know that base ball has been around longer than you
or me or the members of the Greatest Generation. It is the best
and oldest of the great American team sports, and those of us with
red-white-and-blue blood believe it’s better than the
competitions of Greece, Rome, Egypt and empires that rose and fell
in their wake. History tells us common folk kicked around a
Dane’s head in Arthurian England, so obviously the knights of
the round table had no desire to play a gentlemanly game.
Yes, soccer and other games do have a longer
history. But these games do not have the vise-tight clamp on the
American imagination, the epic emotional attachment on the
American spirit or the wallet-clinching squeeze on the American
economy that base ball has.
You might have played base ball from the time you
were old enough to toddle across the yard. You might have
collected base ball cards from the time you were big enough to
finagle a dime from Dad and reach up to the counter at the corner
store. You might have listened to it on a crackling Philco on a
hot summer night or a buffering internet audio player next to the
air-conditioning vent. You might have watched it in black and
white on a Muntz or in high definition on a plasma screen.
Base ball has heroes and villains, agony and
ecstasy. It puts you to sleep and keeps you awake. It draws you to
the corner lot, the schoolyard, the city park, the modern stadium.
It is the pop or the suds, the red-hot or the braut, the snow cone
or the Cracker Jacks.
So where did all this begin? Base ball, the
American game, took root more than a century and a half ago in New
York and New England, regions that still fancy themselves the
beating heart of the game. Posh. Base ball’s beating heart is
anywhere we gather with rod and orb, to play Wiffleball, stick
ball, cork ball, soft ball, Indian ball or just take in the old
ball game.
For a history of the game of base ball (and why we
refer to it as two words instead of the modern one), click this
link for a lesson provided by the Vintage Base Ball Association on
its website: http://vbba.org/whatisvbb.html
In terms of St. Louis base ball, the Perfectos
have strong reason to believe they play in the cradle of the game,
perhaps on the very field where Jerry Fruin taught boys from the
Lafayette Square neighborhood the game he brought to town, where
Shepard Barclay became one of the city’s best early players and
where the spirit of the vintage game is alive and well.
The Perfectos were born and the vintage game was
revived in the historic neighborhood in 2002. The team has grown
in number, in talent, in scope, in faithful following. But it
remains true to the spirit that saw Alexander Cartwright and his
Knickerbocker swells codify its rules and foster its spread across
the nation. The game was too good for exclusive Eastern
gentlemen’s clubs, and it spread to be enjoyed from the Atlantic
coast to the Pacific shore. It was played in Civil War camps and
spread into the South. Wagon trains and settlers carried it into
the West. It was pushed along by the great American desire to
combine recreation and relaxation.
You know the modern game, which has both beauty
and grace – and a touch of ugliness that is the gross excess of
professional sport. But do you know the vintage game? Have you
spent a summer afternoon in the shade of an oak tree, on a blanket
or straw bale, with a lemonade or a Griesedieck in hand and seen
the game as it was meant to be played when it was meant to be a
game?
Read the explanation of the vintage game and its
roots on the VBBA site. But to really know the vintage game, come
to the field at the northwest corner of Lafayette Park on a summer
Saturday. Come breathe the air and see the action and feel the
exhilaration that only base ball can bring. And as you feel
re-baptized in the American pastime, you might just stand erect in
the crowd and make an exhortation.
And maybe, just maybe, that exhortation will be
“Huzzah!” |
