Mike Minor of the Oakland Athletics walks through the stands that are filled with cardboard cutouts during a game against the Houston Astros at RingCentral Coliseum in Oakland, Sept. 10, 2020. The cutouts have become a fixture for most teams this season. (Ezra Shaw\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Yes, some. There\u2019s a set of Jewish Major League baseball cards, there are people who argue about who was the first Jew in Major League Baseball, who was the first Jew of the amateur era to play baseball. So I\u2019ve gotten caught up in such things, as I was the chief curatorial consultant to the National Museum for American Jewish History exhibition called \u201cChasing Dreams.\u201d <\/p>\n
The key to that exhibition, I believe, and its subsequent success and its touring success, has been to identify Jews as not unique as outsiders in baseball, and being brothers under the skin with African-Americans and Latinos in particular, but earlier, Italians and Irish and other nationalities, [including] Native American. <\/p>\n
When you were the curatorial consultant, what did that entail exactly? <\/em><\/p>\nI was the baseball expert. I interacted with other consultants on behalf of the museum, helped secure artifacts, helped to position the exhibition and its companion book. <\/p>\n
Turning to the current baseball season, obviously there\u2019s a lot about it that\u2019s completely unprecedented, from the pandemic to how short it is to the lack of fans. What stands out to you most about this year, and what do you think future historians will say about it?<\/em><\/p>\nThat this was a year unlike any other. The pandemic of 1918 and 1919 barely affected baseball. They were able to get through two regular seasons, and didn\u2019t miss a World Series, and no player at the Major League Baseball level died, although one umpire did. <\/p>\n
The shortened season, the delayed season, the possibility of statistical anomalies \u2014 all of this must be viewed by subsequent generations with historical perspective. The mere placing of an asterisk alongside somebody\u2019s record, how do you view it? Does the asterisk help you with anything? My view is that it doesn\u2019t. <\/p>\n
What\u2019s something about baseball, or baseball history, that most fans think they know but is actually wrong?<\/em> <\/p>\nWell, for starters, that it was invented anywhere, and at any particular time. [Early baseball reporter] Henry Chadwick had the right line, echoing Harriet Beecher Stowe: He said \u201cbaseball had no father \u2014 it was like Topsy, it just grew,\u201d referring to the character Topsy in \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin.\u201d <\/p>\n
For a hundred years or so, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players was regarded as the first major league, even though it lasted only from 1871 through \u201975. When the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia of 1969 came out, there was the creation of a special baseball records committee to review the status of all of the variant or challenging major leagues, besides the two extant ones, the National League and the American. So, the National Association, because of its erratic scheduling and procedures, and gambling, and drunkenness and a variety of moral and practical failings, was demoted as a major league. And Major League Baseball was redefined as having begun on Feb. 2, 1876, with the founding of the National League in New York City. <\/p>\n
What other leagues have there been that have been classified as major or considered as major? <\/em><\/p>\nThe American Association, The Union Association, The Players League, the Federal League, the American League, of course, which survives. But we have never given consideration to the Negro Leagues. And this seems to me a possibly fruitful area for research. <\/p>\n
I know you\u2019re an historian, but let\u2019s talk about baseball\u2019s future. How do you feel about the future of the game? Do you think baseball\u2019s going in a good direction and is as popular as it should be?<\/em> <\/p>\nI think baseball\u2019s in a momentary period of crisis, but that is true of all sports because we have to make do without spectators, we have to create cardboard cutouts in the stands and artificial noises, it\u2019s very very peculiar. So I think the future of baseball, and any other sports, ought not to be judged by the events of 2020. <\/p>\n
The aging demographics of baseball fans is certainly a concern, and the shifting allegiances of younger fans is also a concern for me because the allegiance is not so much to the team in your locality, but to a team of fantasy players, or players on whom you placed bets, and you have devised your own drafts and your own leagues and your own game, and what you\u2019re checking in the morning is not the box score of the Mets or the Yankees, but rather the box score of those players on your draft roster. <\/p>\n
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