Baseball on the Boards

Abstract

Damn Yankees, the smash-hit 1955 musical, is easily is the best-known, most frequently revived baseball theater piece. Other high-profile plays include Elmer the Great (1928), a Ring Lardner comedy that was produced by George M. Cohan and featured Walter Huston as the title character, a comically thickheaded hurler; Bleacher Bums (1977), conceived by Joe Mantegna, which charts the frustrations of Chicago Cubs fans; Fences (1987), August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winner about a bitter ex-Negro Leaguer (a role created by James Earl Jones) and his relationship with his football-playing son; and Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out (2002), a drama about a gay ballplayer.Remarkably, no memorable baseball stage piece dates from the 19th or early 20th centuries. No major producer of the era-no David Belasco, Charles Dillingham, or Charles Frohman-saw fit to mount a baseball play. No Broadway headliner signed on to thrash the villain and smash home runs right before the final curtain.This is not to say that the theater and baseball were then the equivalent of water and oil. On the contrary. During this pre-radio, pre-television era, Americans regularly attended live stage performances. Minstrel shows and vaudeville thrived. Starting in the late 19th century, baseball stars began spending their offseasons appearing in theatrical presentations in which they recited monologues, acted in skits, or tapped their toes in musical numbers. For their efforts, they often earned more money in several weeks than they did for their season-long ballyard heroics. Most significantly, playwrights of all stripes were penning baseball-related dramas, comedies, musicals, skits, and operettas.A representative list of such titles is found in the Library of Congress Copyright Office's Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870 to 1916. It includes at least 36 indisputably baseball-themed titles (see the table at the end of the article), testament to baseball as a fertile ground for invention.Yet collectively, these titles have for decades been languishing in obscurity. One would have to pore through countless big-city and small-town newspapers to determine whether any of them were ever produced-anywhere. But they did exist, at least on paper, and their authors expectantly submitted them to the Library of Congress for copyright.Additional titles in Dramatic Compositions appear to be baseball-related, yet likely are not. Among the characters in The Bat and the Ball; or, Negative Evidence (1889), a farce by F.E. Chase, are a photographer, a photographer's assistant, and a journalist. None are ballplayers; the ball of the title is in fact a Policemen's Ball. The title character in Gabe's Home Run (1911) is no slugger. This comedy by William and Josephine Giles charts the antics of a harassed husband whose wife chides him for never coming home in time to complete his household chores.Some of the authors of bona fide baseball pieces were established theater professionals. Miron Leffingwell (A Home Run, 1909), for example, was an actor-playwright. Gustav Blum (A Double Play, 1912), was a producer-director-actor who was affiliated with 16 plays that came to Broadway between 1923 and 1946. Bolossy Kiralfy (The Sporting Ballet, or, Turf, Oarsmen, Base Ball, Hunters, etc., 1887), was a dancer-acrobat-pantomimist who staged musical spectacles and worked for the Barnum & Bailey circus. Frank Dumont (A Base Ball Crank, 1890), wrote and acted in scores of minstrel sketches and managed the Eleventh Street Opera House in Philadelphia, described in the New York Times as one of the most famous homes of minstrelsy in America. Richard Walton Tully (Base Ball Game, 1910), was a playwright-director-producer whose best-known stage works, including The Rose of the Rancho (1906) and The Flame (1916), were nonbaseball- related. All made it to Broadway. Base Ball Game did not.Others were thriving writers. Philip Verrill Mighels (On the Diamond, 1906), worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and published non-baseball-related novels, short stories, and poetry. …