An Interview with Major League Baseball Official Historian John Thorn

By Cori Brosnahan

“It is true enough that baseball is a sort of Rosetta stone for deciphering our still revolutionary experiment in nationhood,” writes MLB Official Historian John Thorn. Just in time for the World Series, American Experience spoke to Thorn about the game he calls “older than the country itself.”

You’ve said, “In no sport is the past as important to the present moment as it is in baseball.” Why is that?

In football, when we have somebody approaching a rushing yardage record, nobody says, well, he’s good but not as good as Red Grange. In basketball, we don’t think about George Mikan at all. And in hockey, who thinks of Howie Morenz? Yet in baseball, when someone nears 3,000 hits, all the ancient gods come to life: Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Cap Anson — these people who no living human being has seen play all compete for newsprint with the star of the present moment.

Basketball of 1920 doesn’t look at all like basketball today. The same is true of football. And the same is true of hockey. Now, Baseball changes minutely from season to season, and there are occasional massive rules adjustments, like the designated hitter in 1973. But the game that your great-grandfather saw — if he were to be revived to go to a ballgame today, he would recognize it as baseball. So I think the game gives an illusion of permanence. In fact, it seems that in an America that’s basically reinventing itself at every moment, baseball is the one fixed point — the one thing around which our memories turn.

You’ve written about how becoming a baseball fan was an easy way for new immigrants to Americanize themselves. Do you think the game still has that power?

Absolutely. I think baseball helps for the next generation — either people who came over as children born abroad or first generation born in America. As an immigrant child, trying to figure out what the terrain is, you see quickly that baseball is the one thing everyone agrees about.

I can offer my own situation. I was born in a displaced persons camp in West Germany after the war. My parents were of Polish descent — they’re Holocaust survivors. They never understood baseball or cared about it, which, frankly was one of the things that drew me to it because it was an area in which I could demonstrate my own competence, and an area in which I could not merely be my parents’ son, but be an American.

Today, baseball is enormously popular throughout the Caribbean and in countries like Japan and South Korea. Has that influenced the American game?

Actually one of the beauties of the most recent waves of immigration to Major League Baseball in America has been that rather than asking the foreign born player to acculturate to American ways, we absorb change.

Now, this has not been without tension — the bat flip controversy has been illuminating. Players of Caribbean or Korean origin come with a more flamboyant attitude toward the game. They celebrate individual accomplishment, and one of the ways has been the bat flip. You hit a homerun and instead of just dropping your bat and putting your head down and trotting around the bases as if you’d done no big thing, many players will now flip their bat. And there are various techniques for flipping your bat. If you go to a ballgame in Cuba, if you go to a ballgame in Puerto Rico, the fans are much more animated and the players are much more animated — it’s more of a celebration, it’s more of a festival. This may not seem to fit with chivalric traditions as they’ve emerged in Anglo-American baseball. Purists of a certain age are offended by this. But I think it’s a very good thing.

How has baseball fulfilled or failed to fulfill one of America’s most cherished ideals — that of the meritocracy?

I think baseball has often succeeded and sometimes failed, but in its ideals — just as in the constitution of the United States — it holds a model. I think it’s a really good model for how to build a culture in which what you can do matters more than where you came from.

Certainly one can say that there are portions of our population that are excluded from playing the game at the Major League level. You can say that women have been excluded. You can say that the disabled have been (largely) excluded. But baseball is a meritocracy, not a democracy. And I believe that’s a significant difference.

The Cuban Giants formed what some consider to be the first professional African American baseball team in 1885. Who were they and what accounts for the “Cuban” in their name?

If you were a dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking citizen of the United States, you had a higher social standing and came in for less discrimination than an African American who spoke English with a southern accent. So the Cuban Giants, a team of black waiters from a hotel in Long Island, spoke gibberish on the field before they played in order to convince spectators that they were of Cuban origin.

That initial ploy was pretty much gone by the turn of the century, but the name endured. Later, applying the term “Cuban” was a way of making yourself elite among your peers. To say “Cuban Giants,” that’s like saying “Cuban cigar.” It evokes quality.

Between 1884 and 1947, African Americans were not permitted to play Major League Baseball, so they created their own clubs. What contributions did the Negro Leagues make to modern baseball?

The Negro Leagues manifested the best of the white “dead-ball era,” which featured bunting, stealing bases, and aiming to hit balls in the alleys rather than over the fences. This style endured in the Negro Leagues well past its near-extinction in the white majors, where slugging was introduced in the 1920s with Babe Ruth. When integration came about finally in 1947, the Negro League style of play infiltrated the white Major League Baseball style, which had become very base-to-base and staid in its offensive strategies. But power did not disappear, so now we had a marriage of speed and slugging — along with a return of daring and some level of flash. It made for a wonderful game in the 1970s and ’80s especially.

A new fictional TV show about a female pitcher in Major League Baseball claims it’s “a true story on the verge of happening.” Do you think women will ever play in the league?

It seems to me that it is not implausible that within my lifetime — which, at its most rosy prospect would be another 20 years — we might see a female pitcher or a female second baseman. Those are the two positions in which women have shown the most advanced skill on a historical level.

What’s the closest a woman has come to playing Major League Baseball?

There was one woman signed to a professional league contract who pitched one inning of white organized ball in 1898. Her name was Lizzie Arlington. At least that was the name she went under; her real name was Lizzie Stroud.

The Negro Leagues had three women play professionally; there was a Toni Stone, a second baseman. There was Peanut Johnson. And then there was Connie Morgan.

There are many women in history who played baseball, but it was typically on an exhibition and barnstorming level, not in league play. Ida Schnall was a great character — a great all-around athlete from champion level swimmer to tennis player to baseball player. She organized her own club composed of all women players, and Schnall played the pitcher on that club.

Historians are after facts. But you’ve talked about how when it comes to baseball, you have to respect the myths and legends. Why?

Well, you can’t spell history without “story.” A story told frequently enough and one that endures in the popular culture cannot merely be dismissed because it is nonfactual. There’s a reason for its endurance, for its celebrity. So if you look at Paul Bunyan and the Blue Ox, if you look at Davy Crockett and you look at Johnny Appleseed, and the myths that accreted around them — it’s similar to baseball. Stories that are told from generation to generation cannot be dismissed merely because the detectives cannot find factual basis. So Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright, for instance, will live on as “Fathers of Baseball” despite the absence of a factual paternity there.

Who are you rooting for this year?

I think if your team is not in it, and my team, the Mets, are not in it, then the Cubs are the natural team to root for. They haven’t won in 108 years. My friend Jim Bouton said to me over dinner the other night — I don’t know whether it was his own line or whether he was quoting somebody else — “Anybody can have a bad century.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Originally published on October 24, 2016.