[On October 23rd, the MLB World Series got underway. I’ve been thinking about baseball history a ton over the last few years, including for the two seasons of my podcast, so this week I’ll offer some AmericanStudies contexts for baseball playoffs over time. Leading up to a weekend post on takeaways from my latest podcast season!]
On three things I love about the story of “Tessie,” the Broadway musical song (about a parakeet!) that became the anthem of the Boston Americans during their 1903 World Series win.
- The Royal Rooters: That book project in progress from historian Paul B. Ringel looks excellent, and makes a convincing case that this passionate fan group foreshadowed a good deal of where fan culture went across the 20th century. I greatly enjoy the stories of their legendary leader, a saloon owner and prominent man-about-town named Michael “Nuf Ced” McGreevy; and their most famous member, Boston Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald (John F. Kennedy’s grandfather and namesake). (Although I’m pretty sure Isabella Stuart Gardner was already a fan of the team by this time as well, and if so she might get my vote for most famous fan.) I’m sure the Royal Rooters were deeply annoying to not only opponents (more on that in a moment), but really anybody who wasn’t as obsessed with the team as them; so it goes with impassioned fan bases. But when we think about what was entailed in traveling from Boston to Pittsburgh and back in 1903, I have to tip my baseball cap to this impressively loyal group.
- A Powerful Performance: And they didn’t just make the trip—they quite possibly helped swing the series in Boston’s favor. It was a best of nine series, and after losing two of the first three games at their home stadium the Huntington Avenue Grounds, Boston also lost game four in Allegheny (the area of the city where the Pittsburgh Pirates played their home games in that era) to go down 3-1. And then the Royal Rooters sprung into action, incessantly and boisterously singing (possibly accompanied by a hired band, although that’s an ambiguous detail) an adapted version of “Tessie” (with new verses mocking Pirates players such as Honus Wagner). Pirates outfielder Tommy Leach would later note that “you could hardly play ball they would sing ‘Tessie’ so damn loud.” There’s no way to know if the song and performance did in fact influence the outcome of the remaining games, but we do know this: Boston rattled off four straight victories, three in Pittsburgh and the final one back in Boston, to win the series 5-3.
- Superstition: “There’s no way to know, but” is of course a pretty good summation of why so many sports fans can be so superstitious about their potential impact on games and teams, on all of which they can of course have no actual impact. So I really love this pair of details about the Royal Rooters and “Tessie”: they stopped singing the song after the 1918 season, which was the last time Boston (now known as the Red Sox) won the World Series for 86 years; and the Dropkick Murphys released a new version of the song in 2004 (with new lyrics paying tribute to the Royal Rooters and these histories), the year in which the Sox ended that streak and won the World Series. To paraphrase Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane, how can you not be romantic about “Tessie”?
Next playoff contexts tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Baseball histories or stories you’d share?
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