By Kevin Nelson

From the introduction

The story of California baseball begins in New York in the years before the Gold Rush. Base Ball — it was two words then — was just getting started, and men from Manhattan Island and Brooklyn were among the earliest to play it. When gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the dream of instant riches swept across America, some of these New Yorkers came to California and brought the game with them. Then, more than a century later, New Yorkers again had a hand in bringing baseball to California. In this case it was major league baseball. Two of New York’s major league teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, transferred to California, and the state’s first big league clubs, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, began play in April 1958.

The Gold Rush begins the story of baseball in California, but the arrival of the Dodgers and Giants certainly does not end it. The Anaheim (originally Los Angeles) Angels, Oakland Athletics, and San Diego Padres all set up shop in the decade that followed, adding still more layers to an already rich story.

For decades California has produced more major league ballplayers than any other state. As impressive as this may be, it is not the central story of California baseball. The central story is the astonishing mix of people — people from all over the United States and all over the planet — who were and are involved in it.

The man who broke organized baseball’s color barrier was Jackie Robinson, who grew up in Pasadena, California. Born in Georgia, the man selected by Time magazine as one of the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century came west with his family when he was only a baby. They lived on Pepper Street near Brookside Park and the Rose Bowl, and Robinson attended Pasadena public schools, Pasadena Junior College, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey chose Robinson to carry the burden and honor of being the first black to play modern major league baseball largely for two reasons: he was educated and he had played all his life on integrated sports teams.

The media sometimes portray Robinson as a “child of the South” because that was where he was born, but his childhood and early manhood more accurately belong to California. His often painful years there, where he encountered harsh unfairness solely because of the color of his skin, are an essential part of this state’s, indeed this nation’s, baseball story.

The last man to hit .400 or above in a regular season was Ted Williams, who is regarded today as one of the two or three best hitters ever. He was born and raised in San Diego. His father was an Army veteran and his mother, who was of Hispanic descent, was a deeply devoted religious crusader. Unhappy in their marriage, Ted’s parents frequently left him and his younger brother alone in their house to fend for themselves, and Ted found refuge in baseball, developing a lightning-quick batting stroke that took him from the playgrounds of San Diego to fame and glory with the Boston Red Sox.

The man with whom Williams is frequently paired in baseball history, Joe DiMaggio, was born in the East Bay town of Martinez but grew up across the bay in San Francisco. With his brothers Vince and Dominic — both future major leaguers themselves — Joe learned the game by playing pickup ball at North Beach Playground in the city’s Italian district. But their immigrant father, Giuseppe, a fisherman on San Francisco Bay, disapproved of his sons playing baseball because young men needed to work, not waste their time with childish games. Only after Joe achieved fame (and an excellent salary) on San Francisco’s Pacific Coast League team did Giuseppe open himself up to the pleasures of baseball. Joe, of course, went on to greater glory in New York with the Yankees: in 1941, with America on the eve of world war, he galvanized fans across the country by hitting safely in fifty-six consecutive games, thereby establishing one of the game’s most enduring records.

DiMaggio, Williams, and Robinson were the three best players of their generation and three of the best of all time. All overcame challenges to achieve what they did, all are in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and all grew up, at basically the same time, in California.

California and Californian ballplayers have frequently played lead roles in the national baseball drama, although because the major leagues arrived only in the 1950s, the state’s impact on the game is not widely understood or recognized, by people in both the East and the West. The national game helped shape the California game, and the California game influenced the national one, dating back to the nineteenth century.

In the 1880s San Francisco was California’s largest city, the railroad hub of the Far West and the heart of organized baseball activity in the state. Baseball was so popular that an aggressive young newspaper editor, William Randolph Hearst, decided to feature it regularly on the front page of the Daily Examiner in order to boost the paper’s circulation. With this same goal in mind he also hired a shy, bookish friend from Harvard, Ernest Thayer, to write a satirical column for the paper. Writing under a pen name, in June 1888 Thayer published in the Examiner the most famous baseball poem and arguably one of the most popular American poems ever, “Casey at the Bat.”

Since its publication, “Casey at the Bat” has become a fixture of popular culture, endlessly reprinted in newspapers, magazines, and books. It has spawned untold numbers of parodies, in print and song; there have been cartoons, television programs, movies, and even a full-length opera based on it, with many more novels and movies borrowing from its funny-sad theme of a mighty slugger who, rather than hit a home run to win the game as people are led to expect, breaks the hearts of Mudville’s fans by striking out. Though some have claimed that Stockton, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, served as the inspiration for Mudville, Thayer repeatedly denied there was any real-life basis for Mudville or, for that matter, Casey. They were purely works of the imagination.

Another colorful character named Casey, this one not imaginary, is best known as the manager of the world champion New York Yankees in the fifties and the somewhat less successful New York Mets in the sixties. One of the many significant baseball figures associated in the public mind with the East but who have long and deep ties with California, Casey Stengel lived for more than half a century in Glendale, near Los Angeles. In the late 1940s, considered a clown and a loser by many in baseball, he took a job as manager of the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League, and his success there helped revive his reputation and led to his being hired by the Yankees. It was also in Oakland where Stengel met Billy Martin, a feisty Berkeley-born and -raised teenager who would go on to become one of the most controversial and embattled managers in big league history. But Casey and Billy were like father and son, forming an enduring bond. Wherever Martin managed, including in his Coliseum office with the Oakland Athletics, a photograph of his former mentor hung on the wall.

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One of the most fascinating aspects of California baseball is how the history of the game in the state is interwoven with the history of the state itself. In the 1850s reaching California from the East required hard overland travel or an ocean voyage of several months. Baseball reflected this geographic isolation. It was essentially a provincial affair headquartered in northern California, which, at the time, had a far bigger population than the south of the state.

The building of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 changed all this, opening up the state to East-West traffic and increasing exchanges of all kinds, including those related to baseball. The sport’s first professionals, a glamorous all-star dream team known as the Cincinnati Red Stockings, arrived in California in the early months of the railroad’s operation, wowing the locals with their diamond prowess and style. They would only be the first of countless outsiders who would vitalize the California game over the years. The railroads, coupled with the steady wave of immigrants into the state, ensured that baseball on the Coast would not merely be a homegrown affair. Easterners, Midwesterners, Southerners, and people from around the world would transform California baseball, just as newcomers in industry, agriculture, science, government, art, and other areas of endeavor would shape the larger history of the state itself.

In 1903 a group of baseball men in California and the Northwest formed the Pacific Coast League, the backbone of organized baseball in the state until the Dodgers and Giants arrived. The Coast League was a minor league but not in the sense we understand the term today: a group of farm teams vastly inferior to the major leagues. For most of its early history the Coast League was a proudly independent league with clubs in San Diego, Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, and in other western states. It had charmingly idiosyncratic parks, a unique cast of characters on the field, and fans who cared as deeply about their teams as today’s fans do about their favorite major league clubs. Though Coast League pitching was not up to major league quality, many other aspects of its play were, and some of the most storied names in baseball history — DiMaggio and Williams, to name but two — made their professional debuts in Coast League uniforms.

The same year of the Coast League’s founding, another event occurred that influenced baseball in the state: the formation, in San Francisco, of the first Issei baseball club in mainland America. Today California has the largest population of Japanese Americans of any state in the country, and the first generation of Japanese immigrants — known as Issei — began arriving in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Soon they became part of the state’s baseball mix, competing with and against whites who, like them, were the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves.

But in many towns around California the Japanese were not permitted to play in ballparks used by whites. In response they built their own parks in their own neighborhoods. On Sundays everybody came together for what they called “Baseball Crazy Day,” in which even the most reserved members of the community laughed and yelled and placed wagers on the action on the field. Baseball was one of the ways the Japanese connected with mainstream society. With the advent of WorldWar II, however, some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in this country, mostly from California, were rounded up and held against their will in internment camps in the state and around the West. While in these camps, the internees built ballfields, organized teams and leagues, and played baseball almost every day. Their story is part of California baseball, too.