Baseball's connection to the Civil War

There used to be a rumor that baseball was invented by General Abner Doubleday.  The story had it that he had seen games played by his men in camp during the American Civil War and he went home and wrote the rules.  This was not exactly true, but there was a grain of truth within it.  Unfortunately, once that myth was busted, the narrative switched, as it often does in this country, to the polar opposite view.  People began claiming that Doubleday had no part in the invention of baseball, which is not true either.

Baseball truly is an American sport which was developed by people across the country.  And just like those people, the sources of its rules are all immigrants, and it is a melting pot of those concepts.  Men played games like rounders, fletch catch, stick ball, cricket, and other games with a ball and a stick.  Bases could be in a square, a triangle, a diamond, or whatever layout in which the trees happened to be.  Rules often involved getting players around all the bases back to the starting location, but how it was done varied widely.

New Englanders, and especially New Yorkers, like to claim sole credit for creating the sport, but this is as much a myth as the claim that Doubleday invented it.  They did create one of the games in which baseball derived.  They even called it "base ball" written as two words, and it has a lot of familiar rules.  They even had leagues before the Civil War.  However, it was not until the integration of other rules from other areas that the game truly began to take shape to what we know today.

It was during the Civil War, when soldiers from vast sections of the United States came together in camps and interacted, that the game began to fully form.  The men wanted something to do to while away the boredom in camp.  Card playing was a major pastime; but when they wanted to move, they needed a sport that allowed them to stretch their legs.  The biggest obstacle was finding something they all knew whose rules they could agree upon.

Unlike today where we've all learned several games from television and in interconnected schools, the men of the 19th century had all grown up in vastly different cultures.  But since they all played different forms of this game with a bat, a ball, and bases, they had a basis on which to start.  Players from the different regions would explain aspects of their own games, and they would agree upon what they liked and what they didn't.  They had to do what their governments had been unable to do, compromise, to agree on the rules for everyone to play.

This process happened in the North and South.  There were a few occasions when enemies played against each other during sieges or long encampments when no fighting was happening.  This constant exchange of ideas molded the game into a more refined sport, and soldiers took it home with them when the war ended.

One of these soldiers was Abner Doubleday.  He had indeed spotted soldiers playing the game in camps, and he did write about it, including some of the rules he liked, later on.  He had a larger platform than a lot of people, so his version of it spread a lot further.  So he DID have an influence, but that is hardly inventing the game.

The truth is, baseball is the true American game, invented by America itself.

It's for this reason I became interested in writing about baseball within the Civil War in the form of my novel The American Game.  In it, enemy soldiers play a series of baseball games together before they are forced to going back to killing one another.  You can find it by clicking below:

http://www.bandwagononline.com/The-American-Game.html

The American Game Free on Kindle This Weekend

The American Game will be available for free on Kindle this weekend as part of a KDP Select promotion.  It will be available for free on the Kindle from Friday, September 26, until Tuesday, September 30.  It can be found at:

http://www.amazon.com/American-Game-Jeff-McArthur-ebook/dp/B00LJII7GG/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1411618014&sr=8-1&keywords=The+American+Game+Jeff+McArthur

It may seem counter-intuitive to give away one's books for free, but each download counts as a sale, and if there are enough, it can get onto the best sellers list, at least in its category.  This helps with exposure, which leads to even more sales.  So regardless of whether or not you're going to read the book, I hope you'll download it.

The American Game is Released After 18 Years

I have finally finished and released my book The American Game after 18 years of working on it.  I first began this journey back in 1996 pitching the concept to a production company that made TV movies.  At first I only wanted to pitch the concept and move on to other things, but I slowly got sucked into it until I found myself the writer and producer of it championing it in draft after draft after draft; bouncing between studios and production companies.  There were hundreds of actors, (many of them well-known actors,) who saw it, many of whom said they wanted to be part of it.  But I couldn't get it funded.  It was at one point even listed as one of the best movies never made, a list in Hollywood of scripts that are really good, but can't find their funding.

A few years ago, I finally gave up when the production company who made Crash basically scammed me into spending a bunch of money and time to put together a proposal that they didn't intend to consider.  I was so devastated from that blow that I dropped out of the game, and finally decided to do it as a movie.

It was odd the way this story affected people in Hollywood.  It was very much like the ring in Lord of the Rings.  They got obsessed with it and their evil sides came out.  I, too, am not proud of everything I did when trying to get this movie made.  Yet, despite everyone's efforts, it never got made.

The story is about a series of base ball games that take place between enemy soldiers during the American Civil War.  I often pitched this story along with several others, and everyone always picked this one, even if it didn't fit what they did, or were capable of doing.  They always told me it was perfect as it was, then had me rewrite the script to their desires over and over and over.  Most of the time these changes were based on egos and power trips, making alterations that didn't improve it, but worked out some issue they were dealing with.  In the end, I wrote 119 drafts.

In the book, I shed everything everyone else said and wrote the story I wanted to write.  What has emerged is what I hope is a powerful and moving story, but that will be for the readers to judge.  It is, at times, a bit hard to get through, I'll admit, as I did not want to hold back on some of the realities of the time.

In particular, racism and slavery is approached in a very blunt fashion, as is the culture of the South.  I'm concerned that people may interpret the narrative as being harsh, or even racist, when, in fact, it's meant to just not gloss over what existed at the time.  I make an attempt to be clear, particularly in the end, that slavery and the racism it was a part of, (and still is,) are some of the greatest evils of this nation's history; but I didn't want to do it from a 21st century politically correct point of view.  I wanted the culture to be played realistically for its time, and that might read very tough in today's world.

On the flip side of that coin, I hope people don't see this as a reprimand on the South either.  My own personal view is that, while there is very clearly a culture gap between the north and south even to this day, (and I feel the country should split,) the way they rebelled at the time was, in my view, a mistake.  But I try to show this through the eyes of the soldiers who were there and believed in the cause, not of slavery, as they don't own any,but of having their own country.  However, because the story takes place near the end of the war, when the South was clearly beaten, I have a tendency of portraying it as a truly lost cause, so desperate they'll send their troops out at gunpoint.  This did happen, actually, but it doesn't represent the whole war, as many southerners fought fiercely and willingly for what they believed in.

I almost wrote essays at the end of the book explaining these two points at the end of the book, but I was afraid it might look too apologetic.  It may look that way here, but there aren't many people reading these blogs, so I guess it's okay.  In short, I hope people understand the intention of the book, which is not intended to be either racist nor a slam on the South, but a realistic portrayal of an ugly time that was brightened a bit by base ball.  (And yes, I'm saying it correctly.  Back then, baseball was separated into two words.)

http://www.amazon.com/American-Game-Jeff-McArthur-ebook/dp/B00LJII7GG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404688416&sr=8-1&keywords=The+American+Game+Jeff+McArthur