Interesting Times

At the intersection of baseball and history.

This might be the first baseball article to ever feature mosaic portraits of the Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodora. I’ve never been more proud of myself.

“May you live in interesting times.”

-ancient Chinese curse

The unspoken catch to the above quote is that things are pretty much always interesting on this planet, everything just seems a whole lot worse when you’re experiencing it firsthand instead of reading about it in a book. Of course, that’s not much consolation in the moment. Especially if you have three kids growing up in an increasingly ugly and vicious world, like me.

I read a lot of history, so I know my position isn’t unique. And I write about history too, though I come at it from a very specific angle, at least in this newsletter.* Baseball is an odd thing, in that respect. It’s a child’s game, and it’s very much meant for escapism, whether you’re playing it or watching it, but the real world has a way of intruding. I don’t usually shy away from that. Unless you’re new here, you’re aware I use the game as a way to explore my own personal history and experiences. But it’s different when we’re talking about the big picture.

*I would like to put my medieval history degree to use though, possibly even here on Substack. If that sounds interesting to you, let me know in the comments.

I was reading about the Nika Riots the other day. If you’re unfamiliar with the subject, and unless you’re a student of the Byzantine Empire, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be, let me give you some background info.

Chariot racing was the big sport in the sixth century, and the Byzantines celebrated the best racers the same way we put Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge on pedestals.* The racers aligned themselves with different factions, sort of like NASCAR teams, who identified themselves based on color. In the reign of the Emperor Justinian, who was actually a pretty good leader, the two most prominent factions were the Blues and Greens.

*Or George Brett and Greg Maddux, if you’re my age. Pick whoever applies for you personally, but you get the point.

Except, these factions were not just fanbases. They were basically political parties too. Imagine if Democrats and Republicans each picked a side in the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, and instead of Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, picture them all as English soccer hooligans, bringing that same kind of psychotic energy to both the ballpark and the statehouse.*

*This is a different kind of psychotic energy than most of the politicians we’ve elected.

The short, Wikipedia version of the story is this. After a dustup between the two sides resulted in murder, members of each faction were arrested and executed. One from each side escaped, however, when the scaffold broke. Justinian commuted their sentences to imprisonment, eager to move on to more important matters, but that wasn’t good enough for either the Blues or Greens.

They wanted the men pardoned, and when Justinian didn’t relent, they went crazy and nearly brought down the city and the government. Thirty-thousand people died.* Justinian nearly fled, before his wife convinced him to take a stand by telling him she wasn’t going anywhere. He called in his best generals from various battlefronts and finally restored order.

*Medieval sources are notorious for exaggerating body counts, but even taking that into account, it's clear that a whole lot of people died in the carnage.

Fortunately, nothing of that magnitude has taken place on a baseball field. The closet we’ve ever come was probably Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in 1979, when White Sox fans got a little overzealous expressing their distaste for the genre. The drunken crowd tore up the field in between games of a doubleheader after a crate of disco records was blown up, resulting in the cancellation of the second game. No one was killed though, and the empire was never in jeopardy. So, not exactly the same thing.

But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Like I said, baseball is not immune to the influences of the outside world, and sometimes they cannot be held at bay. World War II is perhaps the best example of this, when many of the game’s best players put their careers on hold to battle fascism. I don’t like to romanticize war, but I genuinely believe the second World War might be the closest humanity has ever come to fighting the kind of black-and-white war between good and evil you might typically find in a fantasy novel.

The levers behind World War I were a bit more convoluted and less straightforward, but it had a similar effect on baseball. If you don’t know the story of Grover Cleveland “Pete” Alexander, I recommend you check it out. Maybe I’ll write about it someday. He was one of the greatest pitchers of his era, but his career and personal life were affected by the PTSD he brought home from the trenches, and the alcoholism it fueled.

So, yes, baseball is plenty susceptible to the forces at work in the outside world. But the great thing about it is that it also has the ability to influence the outside world right back. In fact, it has a track record of doing just that, even if baseball, itself, has a tendency overstate its impact and edit the story to make itself look better in retrospect.

I’m thinking of Jackie Robinson, in particular. I’m going to assume everyone knows the gist of the Jackie Robinson story. He was the first black athlete to integrate Major League Baseball, and MLB loves to present itself as a beacon of progressive thought, who set an example for the rest of society.

And there is some truth in that, but it’s also a gross oversimplification. It’s the Wikipedia version of the story. I’m not going to recount the whole story of integration in baseball here. For one thing, this article is more off the cuff than my usual stuff, so I haven’t done the research to have all the details handy. But I know the important parts.

There were many forward thinkers at different levels of the game, and they deserve credit for their actions, but it was not an easy road. Large portions of the baseball world, from the dugouts to the front offices and all the way up to the commissioner’s office did everything in their power to defend the color line. In addition to them, many fans in the stands did their best to make Robinson’s life a living hell. When more black players joined him, they were on the receiving end of equally awful behavior, and the last team to integrate didn’t do so until twelve years after Robinson debuted, when the Red Sox begrudgingly joined the modern world.

MLB deserves a great deal of praise for its role in the civil rights movement, but to listen to them, it sometimes sounds like they’re taking credit for singlehandedly solving racism in America.* I don’t want it to sound like I’m down on them, because they were definitely ahead of the curve, but there are people out there now who will accuse you of hating something if you don’t pretend like it’s always been perfect. To me, that diminishes the sacrifices of the people who worked to make things better, and it’s hard not to get discouraged when I see that mindset gaining steam. It feels like we’re backsliding on so many things.

*In case you live under a rock, they didn’t. Still a lot of work left to do on that one.

Whatever spot you occupy on the political spectrum, I think we can all agree things aren’t great right now. We’re supposed to be entering into the Star Trek-phase of our society, when we finally move past all the petty squabbles and small-minded thinking that has tripped us up for centuries, but it feels like we’re spinning our wheels instead. Speaking of wheels, we don’t even have flying cars yet! What the hell, we were promised flying cars,* and if we had them, we wouldn’t have to worry about spinning our wheels at all.

*If you’re expecting me to accept a Cybertruck as an alternative to flying cars, you are sadly mistaken, my friend.

So what exactly am I trying to say here? Well, that’s a damn good question, and I don’t have a great answer. I really wish I did. Every day, the news is a litany of doom and gloom, interrupted only by finger-pointing and scapegoating. Social media was supposed to bring us closer together, but instead it’s divided us more than ever by giving so many the opportunity to anonymously express the worst of their nature without repercussions. The well is toxic,* and we seem content to continue spreading the poison.

*I’m speaking metaphorically here, not making a point about the environment. That’s a whole other conversation.

When I first started writing as a teenager, I thought I was going to explain the world to everyone, and if they just listened to me, I’d show everyone how to fix everything. Thirty years later, I’m more certain than ever I don’t have answers. I’m not sure anyone does. I could give you some platitude about choosing kindness, and argue it really does make a difference. It would border on cliché, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I absolutely believe it to be true. I’m just not sure it’s enough. Or maybe I’ve become too cynical to believe anyone will give it a shot.

Can baseball do anything to help? It sounds like such a stupid question when I read it aloud, but that doesn’t mean it can’t. Remember when George W. Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch prior to Game 3 of the World Series in the aftermath of 9/11?

Bush was a polarizing president, and his decisions and policies following the attacks on September 11^th were highly questionable, to say the least, but the entire country was shook at that time. Seeing him stride out to the mound at Yankees Stadium and fire a fastball straight down the pipe was significant. The moment was fleeting, but for a brief period of time, the whole nation was reassured, which was pretty amazing, if you think about it.

Ultimately, how much of a difference did it make? Probably not much, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. We’ve made a lot of mistakes as a people since that pitch, which counteracted most of the good it did. But it did do some good. You can’t deny that.

Now, however, we are actively torpedoing the supposedly sacred principles I was taught to believe this country stood for. To be fair, we have often fallen short of that standard, particularly in the actions of our government. But, we have always paid lip service to those ideals, at least, and I’ve never doubted that most Americans genuinely aspired to them. I’m not so sure anymore. It is especially distressing to see the generation who drilled those fundamentals into our heads reach for weak justifications to casually toss them aside.

This is uncharted territory, and we’re going to need something a whole lot more meaningful than a fastball to get us back on the right track. Frankly, we’re going to need more than baseball itself can supply, but that doesn’t mean it can’t play a role.

As we begin a new season, I will continue to look at baseball as an escape, a three-hour respite from the nastiness coming at me from all directions. But that doesn’t mean I’m tuning out or giving up. For my boys, if for no other reason, I will keep doing everything in my power to make the world a better place, no matter how badly the odds feel stacked against me. They deserve that much, and honestly, so do I. So does everyone.

And if baseball can provide some inspiration or comfort along the way, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Play ball.

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Thank you for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. I may lose some subscribers with this one, and it’s possible I could get whatever the baseball equivalent of “shut up and dribble” is as a response, even though I’ve kept a civil tone and attempted to appeal to the better aspects of our nature. If that’s the case, so be it. Sometimes you have to speak your mind, and sometimes you just need to vent. I suppose this was a little bit of both.* If you’d like to do either, the comments section is all yours.

*That said, don’t expect me to make a habit of this. This isn’t going to become a political blog. If I feel the need to comment more frequently on current events, or even medieval history, I’ll find another avenue. As long as I’m writing it, Powder Blue Nostalgia will always be a baseball newsletter.