Baseball Around the World
They set out from Chicago on October 20, 1888, and didn’t return to the United States until April 6, 1889. It was Albert Goodwill Spalding’s world tour, an attempt to spread the baseball gospel (and his sporting-goods empire) to the four corners of the known universe. Previously Spalding, Al Reach, and the Wright brothers had organized a midseason English tour in 1874 that pulled the Boston Red Stockings and Philadelphia Athletics out of league play for nearly two months. Cricket teams from Britain had toured the U.S. as early as 1859, and Harry Wright and Al Spalding wanted to return the favor. But when they got there, the Brits didn’t want to see baseball, they wanted cricket. The baseball players complied, and their unorthodox style of slugging won bemused praise.
The 1888 tour was comprised of the Chicago White Stockings, led by Cap Anson, who had also been part of the English tour fourteen years earlier, and an all-star group selected from other teams in both leagues (the All-Americas). After departing by rail from Chicago, the barnstormers played games in St. Paul and Minneapolis, then meandered through the West with stops to play games in Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Omaha, Hastings, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Salt Lake City. They reached California in early November, buttressed by by such stragglers as John Ward and Cannonball Crane, who had been detained in St. Louis to complete the Giants’ victory over the Browns in the World Series.
The All-American Tourists, shown in this oversize, singularly splendid lithograph, played games in San Francisco and Los Angeles before setting sail (and steam) for the Sandwich Islands, known today as Hawaii. The main isle of Oahu had been the home for nearly forty years of none other than Alexander Cartwright, an original member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York and known to Spalding and Ward as a pioneer of baseball. Hawaii was the first stop for Spalding’s Tourists, but they arrived in port late, on a Saturday, and playing ball on Sunday was out of the question. More important, they had to make up for days lost at sea, so, after the previous evening’s day’s festivities, the players didn’t even stay the night on Sunday. Spalding never did get to meet Cartwright.
The tour continued to New Zealand and Australia, and onward to Ceylon and Egypt. It proceeded to the mainland of Europe, with scenic stops to play ball at the Borghese Gardens in Rome (they tried for the Coliseum and were rebuffed) and next to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. They finished up in the British Isles, where the Queen’s subjects admired the way the Americans fielded but disapproved of the pitching (too difficult) and the batting (too weak, and, unlike cricket, too soon over).
The returning heroes were honored at a banquet at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York on April 8, 1889, where former National League president Abraham G. Mills declared that baseball was purely an American invention, and the audience responded by pounding the tables and shouting, “No rounders! No rounders!” Mark Twain, unwittingly assuming that the Tourists had played in Hawaii, reminisced about his own four months in the Sandwich Islands in 1866. He pointed up the incongruity of that sylvan setting and baseball, “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.”
In the years to come, Spalding ballyhooed the importance of his two tours, but in truth both were artistic, financial, and ideological flops. The game took off in places visited not by ambassadors of baseball but by our military and our missionaries — Japan, Cuba, the Caribbean basin, Mexico. A 1913–1914 tour (populated by Nixey Callahan’s Chicago White Sox and John McGraw’s New York Giants) made a stop in Japan, and later had a grand return celebration in March 1914. That tour also zigzagged across the American West before heading across the ocean. Sixty-seven people were in the traveling party, including players’ wives and a recording scribe, Ring Lardner.
But the most important baseball tour took place in 1934, the second by major leaguers to Japan in the decade (another group had traveled there in 1931, including Hall of Famers Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Grove, Al Simmons, and Frankie Frisch, as well as baseball’s unofficial ambassador to Japan, Lefty O’Doul). But the 1934 visit is the one given credit for finally turning the Japanese into huge baseball fans. Part of the reason was the cast: Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Charlie Gehringer, Lefty Gomez, and Rabbit Maranville, as well as Gehrig, Frisch, Simmons, O’Doul, and the spy Moe Berg. The Japanese lost every one of the eighteen games played, by wide margins, except one: Eiji Sawamura was the losing pitcher in a 1–0 thriller in which he struck out Gehringer, Ruth, Gehrig, and Foxx in succession. Two years later, Japan formed its own professional league. Today Japan’s equivalent of MLB’s Cy Young Award is the Sawamura Award (see: http://goo.gl/b3470i).
Pedagogical demonstrations did not make baseball flourish in Colombo or Cairo, but competitive play turned the trick in Osaka and Tokyo.
“East is East, and West is West,” wrote Kipling, “and never the twain shall meet.” Yet isn’t it fascinating that baseball is the national game of the United States and of Japan, and is regarded by each country as the embodiment of its unique culture? We seem very different, Americans and Japanese, so how can baseball/besuboru perfectly mirror both? Is the game so different in each locale, or are the two peoples perhaps not so different after all?
The game had been played in Japan since 1873, when instructor Horace Wilson taught it to his Japanese students. Visiting University of Washington students played Japanese teams in 1908 and lost four of ten games; the Reach All-Americas also came to Japan that year. Professional tours followed, with major-league baseball aggregations playing in Japan in 1913, 1920, 1922 (including Casey Stengel), 1928 (led by Ty Cobb), 1931, and 1934. In 1927 and 1932 the Philadelphia Royal Giants of the Negro Leagues toured, and they greatly impressed the Japanese with their competitive spirit (many of the white All-Stars took the exhibitions less seriously than the Japanese felt they should). By 1936 Japan had its first professional baseball league.
After a cessation of tours because of growing hostility between the nations, culminating in the Second World War, a U.S. team (Lefty O’Doul’s San Francisco Seals) returned to Japan in 1949. After that, November was typically marked by the appearance of a U.S. major league team, including the Dodgers, Yankees, or Giants.
The 1934 tour was memorable for the massive display of affection for Babe Ruth. In retrospect, however, when we think of that tour, we think of catcher-soldier-spy Moe Berg.
Japan today sends many of its stars to play in the U.S. Kipling could not have imagined this.
