Subjectively speaking, I think nostalgia is unhealthy. Reasonable people know that the past can never truly be restored to us no matter how much we may long for it - hence the appeal of nostalgia, I suppose. We fall in love with things we can never have.
I am one of those who, given enough time for idleness of mind, can wallow around for hours in memories of places and people long gone from my life; but aside from the opportunity to learn from mistakes I have made, that inclination has been of little use to me.
Example: for many years now, the smell of freshly mown grass in the early fall has always made me think of football season. Two or three lifetimes ago, I played high school football, and every day - back when a day was a collection of torturously slow minutes divided by alarm bells and school bells and coaches’ whistles - I, oaf that I was, never suspected that anything would ever change. But when it did, the one thing that lingered immutably in the vessels and passageways of memory was the smell of the grass, those freshly-cut, wind-borne wisps and smatterings of green. And in that visceral way that some things come back to us with inexplicable force, many other memories would return, too, riding on that same wind: the young, mud-streaked faces of my teammates when day was done, the jokes we told over and over, our daily banter and deliberate idiocy.
Yet, aside from thinking that it must have been a very fine time (which it sometimes was), none of that has ever gotten me anywhere. Granted, there must be some worth in a few moments of peace here and there, the peace of finding yourself suddenly able to suspend time…or almost…and no longer disbelieving but saying to yourself: “Well, whadda ya know? It’s true after all - I was young once, too!”
Really knowing some history, on the other hand, is worthwhile and important, and sports history, like popular music over the ages, serves to reflect the events and values of a society during a given time period. Although the steady rise in the popularity of American football might tell us much about the this country - particularly in the 20th century, with its two world wars, the rise of a powerful American military, and the common tropes describing Americans as rowdy, brawling, “shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later” rough-housers, it is baseball, in my view, that serves as a truer national portrait of ourselves. My favorite standup comedian of all time, George Carlin, first performed his famous monologue comparing football and baseball around 1975. One snippet goes:
In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness.
In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being. (See the whole routine here: http://www.youtube.watch?v=zeCtFkHQtEo)
If you’re interested in the long version of the story of baseball, about 150 years’ worth, I know of no better film documentary than the 1994 series created by Ken Burns for PBS, simply called Baseball.
A curious hybrid between those people who are nostalgists and those who are amateur historians has emerged these last couple of decades. I do not really know what to call these people - they are not simply hobbyists or “re-enactors,” but they are certainly interested in hands-on experience; in fact, they hunger for “the real thing” and will go to great lengths to find and devour it. And yet they also seem to take an academic approach to their…avocation? Addiction? Obsession?
I know this is so because on two consecutive weekends, I attended events in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, not far from my house in Chattanooga, which gave me some insight into the mind of the devotee of historical authenticity. The first one took place at Barnhardt Circle at the center of town; the lovely open space there is called the Polo Field, and the Renaissance Revivalist homes that swaddle it are strangely beckoning, with windows like a deceased aunt’s eyes. On the weekend of September 15, the Tennessee Association of Vintage Baseball, founded in 2012, held its season-capping tournament, the Sulphur Dell Cup, at the Polo Field.
Opening game for the Sulphur Dell Cup.
I have attended old-timers baseball games (heck, I’m an old-timer myself, if we have to talk numbers) in other towns in other times, and I have enjoyed the silliness, the baggy uniforms, the pot-bellied sluggers, the beer or two ‘leant’ to me from some friendly team’s cooler… Just watching a player trying to run to first base can bring gales of laughter, until, that is, someone ‘strains a hammy’ or trips over the bag in a slow-motion face plant into the clay. But I can tell you this: in the Tennessee Association of Vintage Baseball, there is no farting around. If this is just a form of nostalgia for the participants, then it is an aberrant, intense, vigorous, even dangerous one. They follow the rules of baseball as they were in the 1860s.
This is not to say that these players don’t have fun. Clearly they do, but it is the kind of fun your grandmother used to have when she made you go out into the yard and cut a switch which she would then use to discipline you (only across the rump, of course - even she knew when to exercise restraint). Games are extremely competitive, and yet there is an antique charm about it all, and an esprit de corps among opponents that you no longer see much these days; it is not simply sportsmanship of the shake-hands, “good game” variety, but a pervading recognition of the worthiness of anyone who really wants to win. The best illustration of that is the frequent invoking of the “huzzah!” A “huzzah!” is an interjection that dates back to the 1500s, a “sailor’s cry of exaltation,” as I learned from the Online Etymology Dictionary (okay, not very old-timey research methods). “Huzzah!” is also a word I now very much enjoy using. The term “Huzzah!” was adapted for baseball in its earliest days as a means for members of both teams to pay tribute to any player who has just made a remarkable play in the field - a diving catch or a long, accurate throw from the outfield to catch an advancing runner, for example. Baseball is filled with many such moments of beauty, of grace and speed, and a “huzzah!” is a fitting way to acknowledge them.
Mountain City players give their opponents a “Huzzah!”
And consider this: plays that merited a “huzzah!” were even more difficult during those very early times because fielders did not use gloves. That’s right, bare hands only. The ball was about the same size as is standard today, and maybe only slightly softer, being made of India rubber and yarn and covered with leather. Bats, of course, were made of wood, about the same diameter as the modern-day bat, but there was no restriction on length.
All of that and more I learned from Danny Gatti, a friend whom I often encounter as I’m walking around Chickamauga Battlefield, also in Fort Oglethorpe. He is a retired history teacher and is one of those who are so keenly interested in old methods and traditions for reasons beyond mere nostalgic indulgence. He serves as an umpire for the league, although in 1860s lingo, he is also called an “arbiter.” The arbiter is not an authoritarian. With no balls-and-strikes count in vintage baseball, petty quibbles with the batter are rare; the good-faith assumption is that the pitcher, who throws underhanded, will give the batter something to hit so that the game doesn’t go on for days. On close plays on the base paths and in the field, the arbiter can even ask for the opinions of attentive spectators.
For many years, we were all tricked into believing that baseball was “invented” by Abner Doubleday, a Union general in the U.S. Army. It is not true. Rather, baseball evolved from older forms of ball-and-bat games (cricket and rounders, primarily), but the the important occurrence was the forming of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club in New York City in 1845. One member, Alexander Joy Cartwright, a bank clerk and volunteer firefighter, took the time to draw up the first set of rules for a game that any of us, if we could streak across the time/space continuum riding a light wave like Einstein in his own dreams, would watch for just a second or two and say, “Hey, they’re playing baseball.”
Here is something about those who pay attention to baseball; it is also the thing about baseball that annoys the people who care nothing for it. It makes for a treacherous rabbit hole… No, it is much worse than that really: it is a deep, gashing pit made by a giant rabbit with teeth like freshly honed scythes, or by a sharp-tipped smart bomb or an out-of-control oil rig; it is a narrow crater that leads not to darkness but to more and more colliding sensations: sunlit grass, the smell of beer and roasting hot dogs, the rushing wind as it gathers in a cyclone of popcorn boxes and hamburger wrappers, the echoing of people’s feet pounding on metal bleachers, the swampy sound of an organ, and so on and on. But the hole also leads to mathematical abstractions, numbers piling upon numbers: runs batted in, batting averages, number of pitches thrown, number of strikes thrown, strikeouts (both swinging and “caught looking”), on-base percentages, the distance to any given point along an outfield fence, the shapes and flex of fences in different parks, the physics behind catching a fly ball, the way the human eye tracks curveballs and fastballs…on and on. At last we are left with a set of small mysteries which can be verified by fact and yet remain unexplained.
Sorry. That was me going down the rabbit hole.
On that sunny September morning, the “picnic feeling” that George Carlin described was indeed the overall tone of the day. Rather than the baggy woolen uniforms and knee socks you see in some old-timers’ games, players were well turned out mostly in colorful trousers, suspenders, collared shirts, and hats. Some of their families and friends who lolled about on blankets in the shade were also in period clothing. It was as though a box of old photographs from a camp meeting or a barn dance had been colorized and brought to life; I had the same odd sense of the familiar that I used to get whenever I looked through my grandmother’s box of old pictures (some of which were daguerreotypes), as if I were looking at people I knew, neighbors, cousins I had seen in the pews in some old wooden chapel - affable lads and lasses who were churchgoers and yet were unopposed to a beer or two along with a few laughs on a Sunday afternoon.
Even their conversation seemed anachronistic:
“Say, Bill, I heard the Mountain City team has brought in a ringer.”
“Well, bless ‘em. They need all the decent ballists they can muster.”
There were a couple of baseball diamonds, neatly lined with shiny, brown-dirt infields, at the adjacent recreation park, but in the tradition of the rural origins of the sport, the Sulphur Dell Cup was held on the wide-open Polo Field. Many of the old rules of the 1860s, now altered or dismissed completely from the modern game, quickly became evident to me: there is no base-stealing or sliding allowed, although a baserunner may take a “gentlemanly lead” if he chooses to do so; pitchers throw underhanded; If a ball is fielded on one hop, it counts as an out (a fair deal, I think, given that fielders are sans gloves), but baserunners can advance without tagging up on a one-hopper. Those are just a handful of the more conspicuous distinctions, but anyone who cares to can find the complete rules at the league website (https://tennesseevintagebaseball.com/rules-customs). The TAoVBB strives for period authenticity, but I should note that the league stresses its inclusiveness; in fact, two of the best players I saw that day were young women.
I will add that if you do attend a game as a fan, a neutral observer, or simply as a tramp idling away a late summer’s day, you should stay alert whenever you hear that distinctive knock of hardwood against stretched leather. The makeshift backstops are only about five feet high, and (especially at tournaments where two or three games might be going on simultaneously) - you may be at risk of being conked on the head with a foul ball.
When I played Dad’s Club baseball from ages 10 to 12 or so, I was not a prospect (a wild understatement of my lack of natural aptitude). My hand-eye coordination at the time…well, let’s just say that it was not at the same stage of development as that of most of the boys. I soon realized that football was my game, when I found that running into other kids at top speed helped to restore my own self-esteem. I will say this: that was in an era when we were not given trophies just for participating, and I am glad for that. Some things are worth earning, and so to the Quicksteps of Sulphur Hill, a hearty “Huzzah!” I could do my best to summon the spirit of the wonderful baseball writer Roger Angell and attempt a summary of the tournament’s outcome, but I do not believe I could do any better than the unnamed reporter who covered it for the team’s website:
This past weekend witnessed scenes of uncommon joy and exultation. In spirited contests upon the green, the Quicksteps valiantly dispatched four worthy adversaries—the stalwart Cumberland Club of Nashville, the Mountain City Club of Chattanooga, the fiery Phoenix of East Nashville, and the nimble Grasshoppers of Chattanooga.
Thus were the Quicksteps crowned Champions of the revered Sulphur Dell Cup, marking their third such triumph in succession, and their fourth in the space of five campaigns. Few clubs in our State, nay in all the South, may boast such a record of constancy and excellence. (https://www.facebook.com/QuickstepsVBBC)
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I hope to have Part 2 of “The Wiles of Nostalgia” ready for publication next week. That post will involve a commemorative event observing the 162nd anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga.