1958, A Patriotic Story Told With Emotion, Arithmetic, Glass Plates and Band Music

I can tolerate—even enjoy—the odd baseball game. Although the lack of combat is unsettling the pastoral laxity of the experience, punctuated by bursts of remarkably skillful effort, at least speaks to the spirit of a less hurried age.

This self-published book was printed and autographed in an odd size, in an age when self-publishing such a thing was a great expense. Whoever James H. Bready is, he loved baseball, loved his city, and loved his nation. If you want to build an empire without having to divert troops to crushing skulls under boot treads at home, then you want a lot of Breadys among your domestic slaves, as well as something passively enthralling, collective, and fulfilling for him to while away the idle hours.

The Home Team documents one man’s love affair with his nation’s national pastime, in such an innocent way, as to show it warts and all for what it is; one of the soothing brushes of domestic bliss that whirl languidly about the soul crushing gears of the machine which claims our every part, our every care.

Interestingly enough, the sport of baseball becomes ever less interesting as a cultural expression as the years mount toward the present. The key years for understanding baseball as a mirror into the devolving masculine experience are 1859 to 1897.

The ‘major leagues’, the minor leagues’ and later the ‘negro leagues’ existed side by side, with the minors serving as a sort of free range talent farming system, as opposed to the corporate system we have at present. At one time during this process the Orioles were a minor league club, there being numerous local and regional minor leagues.

The most salient aspect of this journal is the evolution of the ‘baseball club’ into the ‘baseball franchise.’ The current purveyors of the sport still give a nod to the notion of a club, but it is a mere nod to earlier days. By the end of the process, in 1897, the Baltimore Orioles were playing for their 4th World Championship before a crowd of 30,000 at Union Field, a couple of blocks from where the Irish half of my family resided in old Waverly.

In the mean time there was the Puritanical National League, backed by New England temperance advocates, and the working class identified Beer and Whiskey League, backed by German and Irish brewers and distillers. For a while there was the short lived Federal League.

All the while, the club photos of a dozen men in relaxed poses, with the biggest athletes reclining at the foot of their fellows like Greek athletes on a symposium couch, gave way to photos of ever larger teams, in ever less intimate surroundings, standing in ever more military fashion, managed by teams of handlers rather than pairs, and growing ever more distant from the lens, betrays the erosion of the club at the hands of the franchise owners, the alienation of the managers from the athletes—who had once been one in the same—and eventually the eclipse of the athletic club by the sports franchise. The early club photos looked like photos of outlaw gangs from the Old West. By the end of the period team photos looked like school or military graduation photos.

The death knell for the men of the sporting set, came on an evening in 1894 when the manager of the Baltimore Orioles, gathered the team at a banquet table and led off an infamous toast, “Glasses up, glasses down!”

There it was, members of a baseball club, who had once played for the Beer and Whiskey League, now found themselves employees of a baseball franchise, and as such would not be permitted to drink. They would be traded like community-held slaves, and replaced by draftees, as baseball and other sports began to ape the new industrial military rather than the bands of men who had settled the continent. The player drinking prohibition seems to have been the cruelest blow, with one sports writer commenting on the infamous anti-toast, “Now everyone can groan.”