A Review of The Empire Strikes Out

The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold US Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad
by Robert Elias, 418 Pages, The New Press, $27.95.

One thing you can’t accuse Robert Elias of being is a frontrunner. On the very first page of one of the most unusual baseball books you’re going to run across in this or any baseball season, he examines the origins of the name of the reigning champions of Major League Baseball and explains that we might as well be calling them the New York Wankers.  The Yankees don’t actually come in for any particular scorn, but Elias’s thoroughness requires that he start his story of baseball and foreign policy at the beginning, in the colonial era days when the song “Yankee Doodle” was at the top of the charts.

Any reader with a serious interest in both American foreign policy and the American League is going to love this book.  But I do mean a serious interest – with 97 pages of footnotes (so thorough as to include this writer) his book is no quick read but it is the sort you can open to any page and find something fascinating.  (For instance, when I just did so, I opened to Babe Ruth’s thoughts on Cuban independence and the story of the Washington Senators pitcher who led rebel forces against the Cuban dictator Machado in the 1920s.)  If you’re the kind of baseball fan who has thought about both Leon Trotsky and Hal Trosky, I’d say that Elias, who teaches history at the University of San Francisco, just may have written the definitive reference book for you. (He tells us that when the latter, a Cleveland Indians slugger of the 30’s, was having an off day fans might shout out that he should “go back to Russia.”)

Baseball’s earliest use in promoting Americanism abroad came in the world baseball tours that started in the late nineteenth century.  Elias reports that on the 1888 tour, organized by player, executive, and sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding, players tried to throw baseballs over the pyramids and to hit the sphinx in the eye. Their request to play nine in the Roman Coliseum was apparently nixed by archeologists with little appreciation for the game.

In 1878, the first league outside the US was established in Cuba, a country that would subsequently occupy a unique place in both strands of this book’s story. (Elias does appear to confuse the Cuban pitcher mentioned above with his brother who played outfield with the Senators, but as the serious fan knows, just as is the case with fielders, the best writers aren’t necessarily the ones that make the fewest errors, but the ones who make the most plays.)

The military has long held great fascination for the powers of the game who have had a particular thing for generals, starting with the now disproved claim that General Abner Doubleday invented the game.  Doubleday did actually serve at Fort Sumter, though, prompting baseball executive Branch Rickey to declare that “The only thing General Doubleday started was the Civil War.”  And the game served military purposes in sometimes surprising ways: Elias tells of World War I-era Boston Braves pitcher Bill James becoming an instructor in the U.S. Army largely on the strength of his expertise in throwing the new, smaller, more baseball-size hand grenade – the ability to throw a curve apparently being considered crucial at the time.  And one of the reasons Sun Yat Sen organized the Changsa Field Ball Society before overthrowing the Chinese monarchy was as a cover for teaching the art of grenade throwing.

So when baseball looked to hire its first commissioner, partially in response to the 1919 Black Sox scandal, it came as no surprise that there was serious interest in Generals John Pershing and Leonard Wood.  When they proved unavailable the club owners came up with someone who outdid the both of them in jingoism – Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Named after a (similarly but not identically spelled) Civil War battle in which his father had participated, Landis once told a group of American Legionnaires that “It was my great disappointment to give [Milwaukee Socialist Party Congressman Victor] Berger only twenty years in Leavenworth” for his opposition to World War I, rather than “having him lined up against the wall and shot.”

After former U.S. Senator Happy Chandler was dumped as the game’s second commissioner (ironically, Elias tells us, the final straw was his suggestion that the major leagues might have to suspend operations due to the Korean War), the job was offered to Generals Douglas McArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Emmett “Rosy” O’Donnell, and Maxwell Taylor before ultimately going to National League President Ford Frick.  (The owners finally landed themselves a general when they named William Eckert (the “Unknown Soldier” as some wags called him) commissioner despite the fact that he had apparently not actually been to a ball game in a decade.

The World War II era, when so many stars joined the military that the St. Louis Browns even won the pennant, is replete with baseball tales.  When Congress was considering the internment of Italians, Elias reports that a San Francisco attorney making the case against the policy used the example of its potential effect on a family such as Joe DiMaggio’s, that had eight American-born children but two parents who remained Italian citizens.

And then there was Hank Greenberg.  In his book “Baseball in 1941,” Robert Creamer noted that he’d “been surprised to discover that few baseball fans of my children’s generation know how good Greenberg was. I think the current preoccupation with career totals – 3000 hits, 500 home runs, 300 victories has diminished the appreciation of superb players who had shorter careers. But you ought to know about Greenberg.” As one of that generation, I know that when we first looked into the home run hitters of olden times, not just before steroids, but even before the 162 game schedule, we found there were three players who had hit 58 or more home runs in a single season – Babe Ruth, of course, Jimmy Foxx, who turned out to have been the game’s second most prolific home run hitter up to that time,  and Hank Greenberg.   With 331 home runs, Greenberg had obviously had a good career and yet he didn’t seem to size up to the other two.

Greenberg was Jewish and while there were never any bars to Jews playing in the major leagues, as there were for blacks, there were those who were not all that happy about it.  Elias writes: “Except for Jackie Robinson. No ballplayer took more abuse than Greenberg, who asked, ‘How the hell could you get up to home plate every day and have some son of a bitch call you a Jew bastard and a kike and a sheenie without feeling the pressure.”  SO there was considerable irony when Greenberg was accused in the media of bribing a doctor to be declared ineligible for the military in 1940. He responded by asking for a new physical, was inducted for a one year term, reenlisted after Pearl Harbor and was out of baseball until 1945.  Given that in the four full seasons before he went into the Army, Greenberg had averaged 43 home runs and 148 RBIs a year, but played only two more seasons afterwards, we have our explanation as to why people have to be told “how good Greenberg was.”

Ted Williams, probably the only player with career stats more negatively impacted by military service than Greenberg, turns out not to have been the total enthusiast some might expect.  Having already served in World War II, he thought he was called back into the service during the Korean War for his star value.  Although he flew thirty-nine combat missions in that war and was hit three times, he later said, “If it were an emergency, fine.  But Korea wasn’t an all-out war.  They should have let the professionals handle it. Vietnam was another undeclared war.  If I had a kid [there] I’d have been screaming.”

Baseball players served in the Cold War as well.  After Paul Robeson’s 1949 statement that “It would be unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the Soviet Union,” Jackie Robinson was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee to say that blacks would, in fact, “help their country … against Russia or any other enemy.”  Years later he would call this testimony “the greatest regret of my life” in part due to his “increased respect for Paul Robeson who sacrificed himself … sincerely trying to help his people.”

Political definitions were about as loose in baseball as in the nation at large. When Dodger owner Walter O’Malley accused Cardinal owner Fred Saigh of being a socialist for suggesting revenue sharing between teams on TV contracts — well maybe.  But San Francisco Giants manager Alvin Dark claiming that “Any pitcher who throws at a batter and tries to hit him is a communist” ?  Now that does seem like too much. And naturally, the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players who organized the 1885 Players League were “terrorists” in the eyes of Albert Spalding. Elias even covers the Patriot League invented in Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, written out of history because of the degree of its infiltration by Communists. And just like with Hank Greenberg, you should know how good The Great American Novel is.  You just couldn’t be too careful in those days – the Cincinnati Reds became the Redlegs for a decade or so, until it became clear that they weren’t really, you know, reds.

The beat goes on right through to the present day. The president of the Baseball Hall of Fame canceled a twenty-fifth anniversary showing of Bull Durham in 2003, because of stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon’s opposition to the Iraq invasion. Two years later, then- Oakland A’s pitcher Barry Zito founded Strikeouts for Troops, noting that “Baseball is ingrained in the fabric of America, just like the military.  We thought it was a good marriage.”  Elias tells us that the organization’s funds are distributed by “the Freedom Alliance, a right-wing, pro-war organization featuring the conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity and Alliance founder Oliver North.”

I could go on, but really you should get the book.