For more than a year, I have been researching and writing weekly articles about flags in history, such as the American flags that surrounded Abraham Lincoln when he gave his Gettysburg Address and the bicentennial of the writing of "The Star-Spangled Banner," which is being marked in 2014 and opens each game.
At one point, my research veered into baseball, a natural turn because it's my favorite sport. As I dug into newspaper archives, I found that baseball has many — and long-standing — connections to flags, from the New York Yankees team pennants pinned to the walls of my childhood bedroom to the banners fluttering atop most major league stadiums celebrating past victories.
Last week, America welcomed the new baseball season, as it has done for decades, with flag-waving. The connection between the game and Old Glory reaches back at least as far as the Civil War, when military units organized pick-up games one day and followed their regimental colors into battle the next.
A letter writer told a Capital Region newspaper in 1925 that he remembered seeing members of the 19th-century Troy Haymakers, considered by many to be the first ball club, on their return from beating the New York Mutuals. "The club," he related, "marched up Second Avenue with bats on their shoulders and with the American flag."
Five years later, a columnist in The Albany Evening News interviewed the manager of the Bridgeport, Conn., Bears who were in town to take on the Albany Senators. The skipper, who had played in the major leagues for 14 years, stressed the goal of every club was to capture another banner — the pennant. "He wants to clinch the flag as soon as he can," the journalist wrote.
These flags, which usually unite people, can also be divisive. It happened in 1888 when the New York Giants (who had recently changed their name from the Gothams) beat the St. Louis Browns for the championship. The jubilant New York players were feted in their home city with an evening of entertainment that included a minstrel show and a recitation by DeWolf Hopper of Ernest Thayer's poem "Casey at the Bat." Proceeds from the gala were divided among the players, but they had a grander notion: To unfurl the sign of their excellence atop City Hall in Manhattan.
Mayor Abram S. Hewitt spoke at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge and fathered the subway system, but those achievements earned him no chest protector against the fastballs fired by fans when he nixed the idea. It became, in one newspaper's shorthand, "The Flag Question."
The New York Evening World declared "Hewitt Offends All Baseball Lovers" above a diatribe by its "New York Correspondent of Sporting Life," who said the mayor rejected a petition that more than 500 people had signed in favor of the flag-raising.
His honor, said the author, "began to rave that in case the Giants' pennant was floated from the [Town] Hall then the lawn tennis ranks, the horse-racing bloods and the prize-fighting toughs would want their trophies floated from the same grounds. When Mayor Hewitt compares baseball to prize-fighting he shows deplorable ignorance in American sports. One is acknowledged a healthy, honest pastime, the national game of the country. Prize-fighting gets its following from a lower grade of animals ...Hewitt has offended every follower of baseball in the country."
The enterprising newspaper reached out to city heads in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis and Detroit to ask about their willingness to fly a flag of victory if their local teams won. Hugh O'Brien, mayor of Boston, wrote: "If Boston had won the pennant this year I certainly would have permitted the flag to be waved from the City Hall in honor of our boys."
New Yorkers hurrahed until they got to his final sentence: "That flag should be the Stars and Stripes."
The Philly mayor, a cautious politician, said he would consider the matter if the team won. The Steel City mayor somewhat conveniently claimed to have no power over city buildings or the Department of Public Works.
More forthcoming was Chicago Mayor John Roche, a native of New York state, who vowed to fly a team pennant if his city's clubs brought home the championship. He then tweaked Mayor Hewitt by adding the New York City mayor needed to keep step to 19th-century music.
James Breig is a resident of East Greenbush and adapted this column from his new e-book, "Star-Spangled Baseball: True Tales of Flags and Fields."