2025 Readings 79

 Last night I finished George B. Kirsch's Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War, which is part of my recent run of baseball books. As I was telling my cousin Nick this morning, by the end of the CFL season I will have gone to at least three games - which is three more MLB or NFL games than I've gone to in the last twenty years. However, I've also gone to a boatload of minor league and college summer league games during the same period, which shows that I still love baseball in its purest form. I'm also fascinating by the early history of baseball, which led to me thinking about baseball during the Civil War (the Reds are baseball's first professional team, starting in 1869, so it was a short skip to the war). Here's one of my favorite passages:

In America's National Game Spalding recounted a rumor "that in Virginia, in the long campaign before Richmond, at periods when active hostilities were in abeyance, a series of games was played between picked nine from Federal and Confederate forces." Although Spalding reported no direct evidence of those contests, he did cite "cases where good-natured badinage was been exchanged between Union and Confederate soldiers on the outposts of opposing armies in the field." John G. B. Adams of the Nineteenth Massachusetts recalled that early in 1863 several men of the Union army encamped at Falmouth played baseball and also watched Confederates play games across a river. He wrote: "We would sit on the bank and watch their games, and the distance was so short we could understand every movement and would applaud good plays." (p. 40)

I immediately swiped this section and used it in my Epics books, in a chapter that discusses violence and warfare. It reminded me of that famous story of English and German troops exchanging presents during the first Christmas of the war, getting at the sense of war as sport before the overall horror destroyed that notion.