During epidemics, war and national tragedy, baseball was medicine for the masses. During this crisis, we’re still waiting for the prescription to be filled.
A friend and fellow baseball fan recently sent me a photograph to lift my spirits. Gleaned from the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the image showed an exhibition game played in Pasadena, Calif., in Jan. 1919. The scene shows the batter, catcher and umpire all wearing surgical masks, as are those watching from the grandstand. The image was captured just a few months before the third and final wave of the devastating influenza pandemic that emerged in 1918.
One hundred years later, we are all wearing masks again — but without the game.
It is a cruel twist of biology that the social distancing required in response to the Covid-19 epidemic has also necessarily robbed us of baseball, something that might help to heal our souls. But wait we must — for a sport that has previously proved nearly impervious to both war and pestilence.
During the pandemic of 1918, the World Series was held after a regular season abbreviated not because of influenza, but because of the Great War in Europe. Though ill-advised from a medical perspective, the Red Sox and Cubs were given dispensation until Sept. 15 to play the World Series, whereupon the war department’s “work or fight” order would be enforced, requiring the ballplayers to do one or the other in service to the nation. The Red Sox defeated the Cubs four games to two, bolstered by the pitching performance of a young lefthander named Babe Ruth.
Baseball continued to play uninterrupted during World War II following President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Green Light” letter written in early 1942 to Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first Commissioner of Baseball.
