Pitching Grenades
French Baseball History Part 5
We’re publishing this article to commemorate one of the most deadly battles in history, the Battle of the Somme which began 100 years ago today and claimed nearly 20,000 lives on the first day alone. By the time the battle ended four months later, one-million soldiers on both sides had perished.
With World War I, a conflict in which nearly an entire generation of young Frenchmen were killed, baseball in France dried up. Teams and leagues were decimated or disappeared altogether.
But one thing helped keep it alive. Early on, French officers on training missions to the U.S. noticed how well American soldiers tossed grenades. They were much more accurate and threw with more strength than their own soldiers. When grenade-throwing competitions were staged, the Americans always won.
Why? The French attributed it to baseball.
Teaching their allies how to pitch grenades, however, was as far as the U.S. was willing to go. Washington was still resisting pressure to join the war, its sense of isolationism reflected by one of the most popular songs of the day, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.”
While Washington dithered, American League President Ban Johnson saw an opportunity. Aiming to expand baseball internationally, he sent hundreds of bats, balls and gloves to the Canadian Army in France to “while away the intermissions between battles by playing the American national game,” as the New York Times put it. “Baseball introduced among the French and British soldiers by the Canadians who learned the game at home, is taking a firm foothold back of the trenches. The French are described as enthusiastic rooters.”
Finally, in 1917, Washington succumbed to growing pressure and entered the war. Eager to make the Yanks feel welcome, the French government ordered its soldiers to learn how to play baseball. A book, Comment Jouer à la Balle au Camp, or “How to Play Baseball,” was distributed to troops. It ran a hundred pages and was printed bilingually with one page in French and the opposite one in English. Included were pictures and diagrams explaining the game.
Batting, the book said, constitutes “one of the greatest of manly delights,” and it’s good for soldiers because “it teaches quick thinking and self control.” Not only that, the game is “rigidly honest and no scandal ever arises over imputed dishonesty of players.”
Learning baseball, however, was not without obstacles, the main one being shortage of equipment. So Washington Senators owner Clark C. Griffith established a Ball and Bat Fund to provide everything necessary.
Baseball, he said, will play a part in making “our armies the fittest and best the world has ever known. The U.S. government agreed and provided ships to transport the equipment.
The first was the Kansan, a slow and outmoded steamship which was one of the few that hadn’t been conscripted by the military. On July 5, 1917 it set off for France packed with bats, balls, gloves, shoes and uniforms. The ship never made it. As the vessel neared France’s southwestern coast, it was struck by a German torpedo and sunk, its precious cargo ending up on the bottom of the ocean.
But other ships did get through and by the time the war ended, baseball was up and running again with games being played throughout the country, some featuring major leaguers serving in the army like future Hall of Famers Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander and Eppa Rixey. Although the French had made great strides in learning the game, Mathewson, for one, was not impressed. “I don’t think you could find a first-class catcher in all of France,” he said. “They’re more afraid of a hard-hit liner or grounder than they are of a hand grenade.”
Bill Lange of the Chicago Colts said he didn’t see the French as natural players and that baseball “won’t ever be the rage in France until the ten-cent ball and the ten-year-old kid are properly introduced.”
George Bruni, a French sportswriter, noted that baseball was still something of alien sport to most French who had grown up with soccer, bicycling and fencing. “It’s very difficult to become a good player after the age of twenty,” he said, “because of a total ignorance of a rather important action known as ‘throwing the ball’.” Some players, Bruni said, had an inclination to throw with both arms as in soccer. “Others, particularly left-handed batters, tend to run toward third base instead of first.”
Giants manager John McGraw was more sanguine and said baseball in France would be much further ahead were it not for the war. In 1924, he announced plans for a series of exhibitions in France between his team and the Chicago White Sox.
Twelve hundred miles to the south, however, something even more startling was taking place. Baseball was sprouting in what was called the “Garden of Allah,” in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria which were French territories at the time. Political and religious differences were pushed aside as teams like the Carthage Orioles took on the Red Star Algerians while the Grand Mosque Muslims battled the Israelites. By the 1930s, when warships from the Mediterranean U.S. fleet steamed into port, they took them on, too.
Baseball, quipped one American newspaper, has taken a “vise-like grip” on Northern Africa with Spanish, French, Italian, Maltese, Kabyle, Arab, Greek, Jewish and Turkish players making up the rosters. “What a varied but well-balanced cussing an umpire must get. . .and try to imagine the poor club owner trying to talk francs, pesos, liras, shekels, etc., with his holdouts.”
