[In honor of MLB’s Opening Day, this week I’ll be blogging about historic baseball teams! Leading up to a weekend post on the upcoming second season of my narrative history & baseball podcast.]
On two baseball-specific takeaways from my favorite historic team.
I can’t dedicate a post to the Celestials without first asking y’all to check out season one of my narrative history podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America, if you haven’t had a chance—and asking y’all to share it widely if you have had the chance and enjoyed it! I also welcome any and all responses and thoughts, in comments here or on the podcast site, by email (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu), or any in other way that you want to get in touch. If you’re only able to listen to a bit of the podcast right now, I’d say that the Seventh Inning in particular is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. Thanks very much in any and every case!
While I certainly did include baseball history in the podcast (especially in the Third Inning), I focused there more on Chinese American, Chinese Exclusion era, and broader American historical and identity contexts. So as part of this week’s series I wanted to share a couple more baseball-specific takeaways from the story of the Celestials. Perhaps the most striking is the reminder, offered by the team’s most talented players, Liang Cheng (also known as Liang Pe Yuk among other names), of how much the best players did in that early era of baseball—Liang was both the team’s star pitcher and one of its best hitters (as he had been for the team at his preparatory school, Phillips Andover Academy, as documented in both of those hyperlinked posts), doing what Babe Ruth did (at the start of his career) half a century later and what Shohei Ohtani has done (throughout his career) 150 years later. In the Celestials’ tragic but triumphant final game, Liang both dazzled as a pitcher and dominated as a hitter, and that’s a story which tells us as much about 19th century baseball as it does about this impressive individual athlete and American.
Complementing that story of individual athletic achievement are the overarching histories of local, semipro baseball to which the Celestials as a team connect. No community better reflects those histories than does the city in which the Celestials were founded (because the Chinese Educational Mission headquarters was located there): Hartford, Connecticut. As that second hyperlink piece notes, Hartford had been home to semipro baseball teams since the early 1860s; and even though the city would go on to host some of the first major league teams in the mid-1870s, semipro teams continued to flourish alongside those early professional ones. Indeed, it seems likely to me that individual players like those who created the Celestials were inspired by the presence of both semipro and professional teams in the city, and more exactly by the idea that baseball was an integral and multilayered part of such local communities. Which also means, to add one more brief takeaway to today’s post, that the Celestials’ last game can be read as a form of barnstorming, a vital early baseball history to which I’ll return in the last couple posts in this week’s series.
Next historic team tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d share?
Leave a Reply