Baseball’s Great Experiment

"Jules is a PhD. He was a professor. He was every bit as gifted a historian as the Seymours and more formal than Ritter, Block, or Smith. What Jules did was not merely tell the story of Jackie Robinson and that integration: he told the story of prior leagues and prior integrations. He turned baseball so we saw its dark side. We saw the minor leagues, where racism was far more virulent than in the majors. He discussed the shockingly gruesome experiences of integrating each minor league in turn. Many of the heroes of this period never amounted to much as major league players. He gave them their due. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He worked on a broader canvas that portrayed more than just Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson. Just as it’s convenient for us to just think of baseball’s origins in terms of a single inventor such as Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright, both equally wrong, it’s easy to say Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey combined to integrate baseball, but there were many other heroes. They were not the only two. Jules tells their story too. It’s his greatest contribution to our understanding of the game. We know that Ancient Greek audiences experienced catharsis through attending performances of plays by Aeschylus and Euripides. Sport provides our catharsis. Much of it is ritualised, much of it is repetitive and much of it might be predictable. But because the outcome is unscripted, we are on the edges of our seats. We attach an importance to sport that earlier cultures attributed to tragedies, passion plays and other communal experiences of drama. So when you have something dramatic happen in sport it spills over into real life in a radicalising way."