on the prairie diamond

* Hobart’s Annual Baseball Web Issue. An excess of sentiment and perhaps better judgment leaves me helpless to the charms of Andrew Ervin’s “The Phillie Phanatic,” who is rather certainly related to the Snuffleupaggi of Hawai‘i. (The Phanatic, not Ervin, though one can never assume.)

* A excellent article about how the Suquamish are using their history and love of baseball as a way to strengthen cultural and community ties (via):

In terms of the Suquamish Tribe’s 10,000 year history, the sports are a footnote. But in terms of baseball’s relatively short history, the tribe has been part of the story almost since the game’s start in the early 1800s.

It’s believed that when white settlers landed on what are now Kitsap County shores in the 1850s in search of timber, they brought with them a game that natives took to quickly. Two photographs from the late 1800s — one in Tribal Council member Chuck Deam’s office, the other hanging in the tribe’s museum — show men holding what appear to be baseball bats.

Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman, who played on a famed Suquamish softball team in 1984, said an early native game played on tide flats in areas like Indianola was probably similar to baseball or lacrosse.

“Baseball wasn’t a big jump for them,” he said.

* A review of Peter Morris’s new history of the early organized game, But Didn’t We Have Fun?, found here.

* The philosopher John Rawls understood baseball to be in perfect geometric equilibrium, though commenters disagree. Or as Alex Beam says, “When the goalie comes out of the crease, he’s fair game. And when the philosophy professor emerges from Emerson Hall heading for Fenway, we can argue back.”

* Then again, maybe not: Heller’s “Joe” Baseball Glove Sofa.

For all you baseball fans out there who wonder: Could Indians have possibly, in their wildest dreams, invented the root game of baseball? Answer: Yes. Stay tuned and I’ll begin to blog about this, play by play!

Noted without comment for the moment, a profile of Jacoby Ellsbury in this Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine that begins with a curious (or is it all too familiar?) take on The Warrior Tradition:

As a Native American warrior, your ultimate triumph in battle was not to kill your enemy. It was to use your speed and your smarts and your wiles to get close enough to touch him, and then to slip away. The message was irrefutable: There was still breath in his chest only because you allowed it. Talk about power. Talk about speed. Talk about pride. Native Americans had a term for their definition of victory. They called it counting coup. When Billy Mills was 8, his mother died. His father, a member of the Lakota nation in South Dakota, stroked the boy’s arms and told him, “You have broken wings.” He used a stick to draw a circle in the dirt. “Step inside your soul,” he said. “It is the pursuit of the dream that will heal you.”

He encouraged his son to find his dream in sports, which were providing the Indian with a new way to compete against the white man after centuries of slaughter and treacherous treaties. Native Americans could play by the white man’s rules, but leverage the quickness, endurance, and cunning that had always been central to their ancestors’ hunter-gatherer ways.

Read the rest of it here.

Tags: baseball, jacoby ellsbury, billy mills, counting coup

• By way of the Library of Congress Blog comes word of the new thematic portal, “America’s Pastime,” that provides ready access to the Library’s extensive collection of baseball-related resources.

• The Boston Phoenix reviews books that plumb the seven deadly sins of baseball, including a capsule review of Tom Swift’s new biography of Charles Albert Bender:

In Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star (University of Nebraska Press), journalist Tom Swift has crafted a substantial, vivid story of one of the best pitchers of the game’s early years. Charles Albert Bender was a member of the Ojibwa tribe. He was much loved by his Philadelphia Athletics teammates. But opponents, fans, and media were a different story. Newspapers portrayed him as a crude caricature. “I’m sorry, old Pitch-Em-Heap,” said dead-ball-era star “Turkey” Mike Donlin as he strode to the plate, “but here’s where you go back to the reservation.” At the Polo Grounds during the 1905 World Series, the cat calls shrieked: “Back to the teepee for you!”***

• A fantastic profile of Chickasaw composer, Jerod Tate, his work with the San Francisco Symphony, and latest CD from Thunderbird Records. Be sure not to miss the audio links.

• And at the Iroquois Indian Museum, only 40 miles from Cooperstown, a new exhibit, Baseball’s League of Nations: A Tribute to Native American Baseball Players, which opens April 1st and runs through the end of the year.

***Fun fact from the Baseball Almanac: “There are fourteen former ballplayers who were either commonly called ‘chief’ or simply nicknamed ‘chief’ and in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians they wrote, ‘It is worth pointing out that while American Indian ballplayers were nearly always called ‘Chief,’ this nickname was used much less often among Indians themselves. John ‘Chief’ Meyers, for example, a Mission Indian who played against Bender, referred to him as Charlie.’” (Our thanks to Allison for the link.)

Between workshop sessions at Returning the Gift, Brenda Child (Ojibwe author of Boarding School Seasons) and Daniel Justice (Cherokee, author of Our Fire Survives the Storm) are caught on-camera talking about who they’re rooting for in this year’s tight race. I bet you thought I was going to say, Obama or Clinton. Nope, I meant Joba Chamberlain or Jacoby Ellsbury.

Related: Deadspin’s Baseball Season Previews of the Yankees and the Red Sox.

By way of our correspondent, Lara Mann, comes this find:

This must be a pretty wild picture. From The Milwaukee Sentinel, July 30, 1892.

A Cleveland, O., engraver, under the auspices of the baseball league, has just published a picture representing the Indians playing baseball when Columbus discovered America. And the Indian spectators are so absorbingly interested in the game that the sudden appearance of Columbus and his Spanish companions from another world does not evidently divert their attention from the game until finished, although the Indians don’t know but that they were from the moon or the celestial regions.

Much has been said of the species of insanity that reveals itself in the mind of the baseball devotee of to-day during the progress of a game or pending the report of one, but it wasn’t supposed the noble red man was affected by a similar weakness. During the Minneapolis convention, when President-making for the greatest Republic on earth was supposed to interest the average mind, the baseball fanatic, when the most exciting scene of the convention was on, would come into the Times’ telegraph room and breathlessly inquire for the latest news from the plains of Bitter creek, where the club from Podunk Center was contesting a game of ball with the amateur nine from Litchfield Corners.

It looks, too, from casual study of this reminiscent picture from the special artist of Mr. Christopher Columbus, that the Indians, in 1492, had the same rules and code of procedure that the American league has adopted just 400 years later, for 1892. It has been supposed that the great American game of baseball was progressive, like everything else, but probably the Indians had it then reduced down to perfection so that progress was impossible. Some of the literary cranks, who hate baseball on account of its monopolizing so much space in the newspapers, have told us it was a barbarous game; and perhaps they knew all the time that it originated and was perfected by the barbarians of North America, since it is native-born. No naturalization papers have been necessary, and outside of any legal procedure, it would seem that under the refining influences of civilization it has surprisingly preserved its native purity.

What interests me is that the picture was patronized by the Baseball League, depicting Indians as the originators of baseball. I assume that they were trying to show that baseball is wholly America’s sport because nothing can be more indigenous to America than Indigenous Americans. The whole thing’s kind of back handed though: in once instance we invented baseball, but in another we didn’t care that a whole mess of people were arriving on our shores. I don’t know where else they were thinking baseball came from, but the tone of the article makes this proposition sound like the latest, wildest scientific theory: that Indians could have invented baseball. And of course the article ends with the disclaimer that if Indians did in fact invent baseball, then it must have been “barbarous” and “reduced down to perfection,” a phrase I find to be both hilarious and two-faced: “reduced” as in “boiled down to, purified” or “reduced” as in “simplified, dumbed-down?” Not quite the unambiguous journalistic style people seem to shoot for these days.

[ed. The description of this etching reminds us a lot of this one in which Alaskan natives are depicted playing baseball in the dead of winter, while wearing seal skin parkas and mittens, naturally. But we've yet to track down the etching described in the article above. Anyone?]

The caricaturing of Indians baseball players in the nineteenth-century newspapers goes a long way in explaining why American Indians became thought of as mascots for sports rather than the brilliant fielders and star players that they often were. Indians are being dumbed down in the newspapers as caricatures of savage drunkards, [as if they are the only ball players who drink, that's laughable if you follow sports]. Most of these newspaper reports are second hand, third hand, reports, but they spread like blogs of the 21st century with a repeated message. Indians are savages . . . even when they are good baseball players. It seems to me to be a no-win situation.

So it comes as little surprise, if always still a kick in the gut, to come across an article like the one which appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser dated February 13, 1890, reporting with an incredulous wonder the arrival of an Indian student to Yale University who might, just might, contend to play on their hallowed fields:

News comes from Yale College that “H.H. Lyman, a full blooded Sioux Indian, of the Yankton tribe, is a candidate for a place on the nine,” and that “he will undoubtedly be selected.” This is interesting for more reasons than one. Mr. Lyman will add a picturesque element to next season’s baseball games. When Harvard and Yale meet on Holmes field at Cambridge the presence of the full blooded Sioux cannot fail to prove a very strong attraction to our people. Possibly a generous enthusiasm for him may somewhat impair the loyalty of spectators who would naturally shout for their home team.

There is something highly interesting, from a scholarly point of view, in this case. For it is said on good authority that the Sioux student is not only an adept at the bat, but is highly proficient in the class room. There is a problem for those to solve who magnify the laws of heredity. A youth comes from a tribe of red Indians. The future candidate for a place on the Yale nine imbibed with his infant nourishment influences handed down through long generations of barbarism. Yet, behold, in young manhood this brave takes his place in academic halls, side by side with scions of New England’s earliest families, with you whose ancestors haunted the cloisters of Oxford and Cambridge in old England, and straightway he proves himself their intellectual as well as their athletic peer.

It will not quite suffice to aver that this case is exceptional. Even so, the exception needs to be accounted for. But, while instances of scholarly aborigines at our chief seats of learning are not numerous, it is no uncommon thing to find at Harvard and Yale bright, vigorous, masterful students, who are natives of countries that no one ever thinks of as in the first or even the second rank, judged by standards of culture. Such young men cannot apply to themselves Tennyson’s splendid boast:

I, the heir of all the ages,
In the foremost files of time.

But they often display an astonishing capacity for entering into an inheritance which is not theirs by birthright.

“This article mostly dumbfounds me, it’s so offensive,” my fabulous research assistant, Lara Mann, wrote when she came across this piece. “Mr. Lyman was obviously an oddity that they were reporting on, not so much for his baseball prowess as his intellectual capacity. There were several Indian baseball teams (tribal, boarding schools, etc.) in 1890, so that wasn’t weird. What is out of the ordinary is that Lyman was playing on a white team, especially a collegiate team, AND (even more exceptionally) excelling academically, seeing that he is sub-par ‘judged by standards of culture.’” And even in an article in which the “savage drunkard” seems trumped by “noble” triumphs both on and off the field, still emerges the idea of imbibing, here “his infant nourishment influences handed down through long generations of barbarism.” That image can’t but appear.

As you can imagine, “H. H. Lyman” did not miraculously, behold!, materialize a collegiate ball player in New Haven, but is best we can trace Henry H. Lyman, a graduate of Hampton Institute and member of the 1889 Hampton Indian Nine at a time when the historically black college was forced by law to field segregated teams. That’s Henry in the image above, seated on the far left. We can imagine, but not know for certain, that he was one of the many taken away personally by Captain Pratt and brought to Virginia by steamboat and train. After graduating from Hampton, Henry Lyman went on to Yale to study law, graduating in 1891. After that, we lose his thread. There is mention that he practiced law in New York City for a year before he became ill, that he traveled back to Hampton for a time before returning home to the Yankton Agency in the hopes that his health would improve. “Lyman seems to illustrate an interesting ‘transition’ I see going on in America in the late 1800s,” Lara concluded. “There were Indians in a bunch of different capacities in the American mind, some obviously thought to be more civilized than others, judging from tone. Lyman seems to represent a new possibility for the American Indian in the American conscience.”

For more, a three part series from Indian Country Today profiling life at Hampton Institute for American Indian students. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Image: The 1889 Hampton Indian Nine. Hampton University Archives/Indian Country Today.

Via Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf comes an announcement for the 15th annual Nine Spring Training Conference, March 13-16. If only we could be in Tuscon for Royse Parr’s presentation on “Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club”:

Ben Harjo, a full-blood Creek Indian, formed a professional Indian baseball club that was financed by his oil-rich, full-blood Seminole Indian wife, Susey. After touring Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas by team bus in 1932, the team won the prestigious “Little World Series” in Denver, Colorado. In 1933, the team toured 15 states from their Holdenville, Oklahoma, home to Maine with 46-year-old Jim Thorpe initially as a gate attraction/coach and then as the playing manager.

Alas, we can only hope someone is kind enough to blog conference reports and dream of Cactus League play. Find the full program here.

Also via Ron Kaplan, a call to contribute to an anthology on “Baseball and Politics,” edited by Ron Briley:

This collection will focus upon the intersection between baseball and the political arena-nationally as well as locally. A diverse range of political opinion will be encouraged in the volume. Possible topics for investigation include:

* Racial integration and discrimination in the sport
* The politics of stadium construction and financing
* Baseball and the women’s question
* Gays in baseball
* Baseball and religion
* Baseball and imperialism
* Baseball and war (Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Iraq War)
* Political opinions and activities of baseball players and management [...]

For more topics and information about submitting, click here.

Image: Baseball Follows the Flag from the A.G. Spalding Baseball Collection, New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

One might begin here with a tip of the cap to Louis Francis Sockalexis, acknowledged by history or habit as the first American Indian to play major league ball. More certainly, he was the first Penobscot to play in its leagues. In 1897, his first season with the Cleveland Spiders, Sockalexis batted .338 in the first 66 games of his career, this seven years after Wounded Knee.

Joe Posnanski, among many, has put the lie to the the myth that Cleveland’s current MLB team was named to remember the achievements of Sockalexis. Likely, he was little more than an afterthought at the time, later more a pacific justification. During the early years of its history, Posnanski notes, Cleveland had been known as the Blues, the Broncos, for 11 years as the Naps (nicknamed for star player, Napoleon Lajoie), even most strangely, the Infants. But by 1915, when the team officially changed its name to the Indians, they were a crew desperate to shed the memory of past failure. (Their 1899 season in which they went 20-134 might be forever known as the worst ever. The season before the change, they had lost 102.) Rather than the intense but brief success of Sockalexis, the new name seems more reasonably an attempt to conjure the miracle of a winning season akin to that of the Boston Braves the year before.

His death at 41 was due to heart failure while logging, according to the New York Times. The obituary published on Christmas 1913 describes his grandfather as a past Governor of the Penobscot — note: his grandfather was not referred to as a “chief” — and hints at Sockalexis’s attempts to revive his baseball career after his three season with the Spiders, none of which really took. Two of his last known games were played in May 1907 against players from the Philadelphia Giants of the Negro League. Sockalexis was 35. During a late season Nor’easter, “he pulled down two high [flies] out of the hurricane and the one that he didn’t get was on account of the wind,” wrote the Bangor Daily News at the time. “Old Sock got into the game yesterday with more signs of life than he has shown yet.”

To recognize Louis Sockalexis as the first American Indian to play in the major league is not to leave the impression he was the first American Indian to play the game or the beginning. Far from it. The role of American Indians in baseball begins long before the statistics and mascots of organized ball, as we are about to see.

Related:

The Story of Sockalexis - The Baseball Reliquary
Redeeming Sockalexis - Bangor Metro
Penobscots: Cleveland’s Chief Wahoo Insults Sockalexis - Kennebec Journal
Accounts of the May 1907 games - Bangor Daily News
(Be aware: the descriptions of these games against the Philadelphia Giants, quoted from the paper’s archive, are painfully racist.)

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Credit: Lori Robins, Chickasaw

The Mill Creek Chiefs is a respected family team from Mill Creek in Chickasaw Country. The team picture was loaned to me when I was doing research for the film I co-produced with James Fortier. Our 30-minute documentary, titled Playing Pastime is a fast-paced look the tribal teams still playing ball in the fields of their ancestors in Native Oklahoma. When we raise additional funds for the 90-minute documentary, the Mill Creek Chiefs are one of the teams we hope to follow in the documentary.