How we grew up together

An argument can be made that California did not truly come of age until 1958, when major league baseball arrived on the West Coast. But as Kevin Nelson points out in “The Golden Game,” baseball was being played here long before the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn. In fact, his wholly charming and endearing book allows us to see baseball as a kind of benchmark for the birth and growth of California over the last century and a half.

California’s connections to baseball began during the Gold Rush, when men who learned how to wield bat and ball on the streets of New York first brought the game to the gold fields. So-called “wagon tongue” bats, for example, were fashioned from the tongues and axletrees of the wagons that carried the pioneers to California. It was William Randolph Hearst’s Daily Examiner in San Francisco that in 1888 first published “Casey at the Bat.”

“The Golden Game” is full of colorful anecdotes and asides. “ ‘Wide Awakes’ was a popular team name,” writes Nelson about the early years of amateur baseball in California, “describing men who got up early to play before they reported to their day jobs.” At what was probably the first night game to be played in Los Angeles, a searchlight was focused on various individual players on the field, thus inspiring the Los Angeles Times to dismiss the spectacle as “burlesque baseball.” All three DiMaggio brothers -- not only Joe but Vince and Dom too -- started playing baseball for the San Francisco Seals in the 1930s.

“Legend has it that Joe learned to hit using a sawed-off oar from his father’s fishing boat,” Nelson writes. “You know this could not be true because Joe hated fishing ... hated the smell of it, hated everything about it.”

Some of the tales in “The Golden Game” carry a sting. The best team in the local Nisei league that played in Southern California during the 1930s was the Los Angeles Nippons. “On the afternoon of December 7 or December 8 -- the exact day is not clear -- the Nippons were playing in Los Angeles against a studio team from the Paramount movie lot,” he recounts. “During the game FBI agents arrived at the field and watched from the sidelines. They did not interfere with the game, waiting until it was over before taking the Nisei players away for questioning.”

Indeed, the author always widens the focus to put baseball in its context in the social and cultural history of California. He points out, for example, that when the Cincinnati Red Stockings played an exhibition game in San Francisco in 1869, it was an adventure rather than a road trip: “For them Chicago was ‘the West.’ ” (For the record, the Red Stockings defeated an amateur team called the Eagles 35-4, and the game against the Atlantics was mercifully ended after the Red Stockings racked up a 76-5 lead by the fifth inning.) The team did not even bother trekking to the backwater town of Los Angeles.

Nelson shows us that baseball was always much more than a form of recreation or entertainment -- it was a means of self-definition. Thus, for example, a semipro team called the Electrics was sponsored by the Los Angeles Consolidated Railway, and a team that started out in Hollywood as the Stars was renamed the Padres when it moved to San Diego. A barnstorming team known as the House of David did not require its players to be Jewish, but they did have to grow beards. The “Colored YMCA” was an all-black team, and the San Fernando Valley Aces were all-Nisei. Across California, small towns announced their existence by fielding their own amateur baseball teams, Fresno, Petaluma, Santa Cruz and Watsonville among them.

Then, too, baseball offered a way out and a way up for young people like Jackie Robinson. He “hooked up with a gang of boys -- ‘blacks, Japanese and Mexican kids’ ” while growing up in Pasadena, but it was high school sports and, later, a stint on an all-black baseball team in the Owl League that put him on the path to breaking baseball’s color line. He glimpsed his destiny in 1938, when he played on an integrated youth team that took the field against the Chicago White Sox during spring training. “ ‘Geez,’ White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes reportedly said, ‘if that kid was white I’d sign him right now.’ ”

California baseball, like the state itself, defied traditions that prevailed in the rest of the country. The California League, for example, “was branded an ‘outlaw’ league,” explains Nelson, because it refused to comply with the strict rules imposed on baseball by the National League. Geography, even in the age of train travel, kept the major leagues out of California. When Babe Ruth showed up in Hollywood, for example, it was strictly for pleasure or publicity. On one trip, he posed with an outsized bat so long that it took seven starlets to help hold it, and he played a character based on himself in a 1927 film titled “The Babe Comes Home.”

Both California and baseball changed fundamentally in 1958, when the Boeing 707 entered commercial service and, not coincidentally, the Dodgers and the Giants moved west. “Baseball could now call itself the national pastime without apology,” said baseball historian John Thorn.

At the same time, as Nelson shows us, all of the curiosities and eccentricities that made California baseball something unique were cast into the shadows. In “The Golden Game,” we see for ourselves exactly what was lost and what was gained on April 15, 1958, when the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers first took the field in San Francisco’s Seals Stadium. *