The Chariot of Desire: Part III

October 20, 2017

In recent years, the winds of ignorance have been gusting my sails toward the past. My grasp of history, particularly United States history, was largely unearned and unchallenged. When Thomas Jefferson said all men were created equal, I took him at his word. I had to. Imagine believing one thing and knowing another.

The blustery winds of baseball have also filled my sails. I rode a northerly earlier this year to Los Angeles for the World Baseball Classic finals, where I found an exhilarating intersection of all-star baseball, international culture, and batting helmets full of nachos. I have to admit that the trip mostly validated everything I already loved about my favorite sport. Baseball is a near-perfect conduit for storytelling, for all its boundless idiosyncrasies, its mathematical constraints, its deliberate interdependence, and most importantly its uncanny utility for juicing raw life from the fruit of the moment. If you think baseball is boring, well, you’re right. It is boring. It’s designed to be boring. But I would contend that a two-out, 3-2 count in the bottom of the ninth with a runner on second in a one-run game strains to be boring. Life is lulls with moments, and baseball is a mimic of life. In a word, it’s art, except it’s better than art because it has batting helmets full of nachos.

The history of baseball stashes a long series of lulls and moments. I’ve grown increasingly fascinated with that history, so much so that I made the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., my first premeditated stop on my sweet Chariot’s cross-country ride.

Jackie Robinson is rightfully credited for breaking the “color barrier” in professional baseball, but he was not the first black player in Major League Baseball. The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum tells us that Moses Fleetwood Walker was the first black ballplayer in MLB. Recent research suggests it actually may have been William Edward White, the son of a slave and a plantation owner. He appeared in one game for the Providence Grays on June 21, 1879, five years before Walker. But White had a secret weapon in his professional baseball arsenal that may have boosted his resume: he could pass as white. All his life, the light-skinned White identified as a white man, an invaluable asset that Walker could never call upon.

Walker—and later, his brother Weldy—played for the Toledo Blue Stockings during the 1884 season. Neither he nor his brother returned to the team the following season, in large part due to the influence of Chicago White Stockings (now the Chicago Cubs) player-manager Cap Anson. Anson regularly refused to play any team that featured black players, including Walker’s teams on multiple occasions. Only once, during an August 1883 exhibition matchup with Toledo, did Anson relent to sharing the diamond with Walker. His hand was forced when Toledo’s manager informed Anson that Chicago would lose their share of box office revenue for the game if the team didn’t play.

Protests like Anson’s became so commonplace during the 1880s that it was eventually impossible to put forward a roster with any non-white players. For this reason, Anson is the villain and unfortunate catalyst for the NLBM. And frankly, he’s a villain to all of baseball history. He’s a thief who robbed us all of great moments, like Satchel Paige pitching against Babe Ruth for the pennant, or Josh Gibson hitting a World Series-clinching home run—or for the love of God, Rube Foster striking Ty Cobb out. If Jackie Robinson doesn’t sign a Major League contract, step onto Ebbets Field in 1947, and absorb all of this country’s virulent, entrenched contempt for his body, what else is taken from us? Aaron? Clemente? Bonds? The World Baseball Classic?

Major League Baseball conspired for decades to keep black players out of baseball for no logical justification other than to preserve and mimic the prevailing institutional racism that brought comfort to those who depended on it. It’s a monumental tragedy, and it’s a near-perfect telling of the story of life in the United States.