Baseball begins and ends with flags
It’s almost time to “play ball!” And with the return of the baseball season come plenty of flags – American flags, pennants and banners – which have always been associated with the game.
Before Fort Sumter was shelled in the harbor outside Charleston, South Carolina, igniting the Civil War 155 years ago in 1861, baseball fever raged in urban and small-town environments, and flags waved to alert citizens to the nearby action of pitch-and-hit.
In 1858, for example, a writer for The New York Times noted that “the flag of some club is always flying, and two lads seldom meet in the street with ten minutes to spare that they are not practicing throw and catch.”
“Baseball in Blue and Gray,” a book about early baseball, tells how “the American flag was commonly used to consecrate baseball.” An example occurred in 1859, when “a bevy of ladies presented the Stars and Stripes to the local Essex Base Ball Club” in Danvers Centre, Massachusetts.
Against a background of waving flags, baseball grew up and became the talk of the town. For instance, when the Excelsior BaseBall Club hosted a kick-off fundraising concert in Philadelphia in 1867, just two years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox and President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, the festivities included the gift of “a beautiful silk flag.” Not content with that, “a set of silk flags and twelve caps were presented by the young ladies” to the team.
Another sure thing was the object every team was vying for: the pennant. In the early years of organized play, it was often termed a whip pennant, so named because its snap in the wind sounded like the crack of a lash. The triangular cloths are still sold in stadiums and hung in rooms by young fans of the teams whose logos appear on them. Older franchises – the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals being two examples – even offer retro pennants for sale.
As now, teams in the 19th century wanted the one and only pennant that flew as a sign of their championship status. In 1868, three years after the Civil War’s end, a team from the South Bronx, nicknamed the Unions, took home what The New York Times dubbed “the champion whip pennant.”
A year later, The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune complained that “no club outside of New York has been able to fly the ‘whip pennant,’ as the nominal champion club of the country.”
Who will win the league pennants and World Series banner this year? This is guaranteed: That team, like all of them, will have honored the American flag before the first pitch is ever thrown in every game of the season.