CLEVELAND, Ohio — Spring has finally arrived, and baseball is back once again.
Ah yes, the sport that builds nations, foments revolution, distracts from scandals and massacres, propagandizes national policy, becomes a tool of war and espionage, and may have been the reason why Gen. George Armstrong Custer made his last stand.
At least that’s baseball according to Scott Rowan, author of the new book, “Weaponized Baseball: Declassified, Withheld Stories Reveal Baseball’s Hidden Role in Geopolitics, International Military Action, Mental Manipulation & Mass Distraction.”
In it, Rowan bares the dark and sometimes weird aspects of a sport partially built on myth and misinformation.
A few examples from the book, written by a veteran sports reporter and editor, include:
- A baseball rivalry within the Seventh Cavalry may have prompted Gen. George Custer to disastrously split his forces at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, so Custer could deprive a fellow officer of the “glory” that turned out to be a massacre.
- Chinese revolutionaries of the early 1900s created baseball teams as a means of teaching the basic skills of throwing hand grenades.
- Before he became President, William Howard Taft was governor-general of the Philippines and introduced baseball there as a means of diverting tribes from headhunting.
- One of the many assassination plots directed at Cuban leader Fidel Castro involved packing a softball with explosives to be tossed at Castro’s car. That pitch was never made.
- Just prior to World War II a member of an American all-star baseball team on an international tour surreptitiously filmed military installations in Japan, and later became an agent for the wartime Office of Strategic Services.
- German dictator Adolf Hitler embraced baseball as an exhibition sport and propaganda tool in the 1936 Olympics that his country hosted, as a way of diminishing any suspicions about his future military plans.
- A Cincinnati baseball manufacturer fitted softballs with miniature radios inside. The balls were then shipped to Americans in POW camps in Germany during World War II.
- Gen. Douglas MacArthur used the first Inter-Hemispheric Semipro World Series in Japan to divert international attention while making an ambitious amphibious landing at Inchon, Korea, during the Korean War.
- Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo created an all-star baseball team, drawing from the talent of the U.S. Negro National League, in a competition to distract his citizenry from the murder of more than 20,000 Haitians in 1937, saying, “It’s good to have people (watch) baseball (so) they don’t pay attention to politics.”
To Rowan, the book is a way of using baseball as an education in world history.
“I just knew a ton of little stories that were fascinating and went well beyond the box scores, had nothing to do with a score or a statistic,” Rowan recently said in a telephone interview.
“The running motivation and theme and motto of the book is that sports can do more than just entertain. In the right hands, it can educate,” the Chicago-based author added. “The book is an attempt to make sports more, not less.”
In the book, Rowan also noted that, “The goal of the book isn’t to delve too deeply into one topic, but to share as many mind-altering tales as possible so that global history becomes a series of stores about your favorite teams, players and people, not boring facts from a dusty tome.”
Cleveland gets a mention in the book from the days when baseball was directly linked to the home front effort during World War II, raising millions in war bond sales and donations at games. Rowan writes that Major League Baseball and the Negro leagues staged special all-star games at Cleveland Municipal Stadium as part of that effort.
The book’s 55 chapters are short and sometimes tantalizingly titled, such as “STDs & Pancho Villa.”
It’s hard not to read further after that chapter starts, “One of the biggest boosts that baseball received was due to sexually transmitted diseases and the worst mainland terrorist attack in U.S. history prior to 9/11.”
The attack came when Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa killed 18 Americans on a raid into this country in 1916. The attack resulted in a study of America’s fighting men, which discovered a shocking prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, prompting the U.S. military to embrace baseball during training as a wholesome alternative to less savory pursuits.
Rowan noted in the book, “By the time World War II had commenced, baseball was not only integrated into the physical aspect of military training, but was also involved in the war’s planning and propaganda.
“After World War I, baseball’s role in global relations was no longer just the physical introduction of the game to new regions, but the specific use of the game both as a means to gather information about future military allies (or enemies) as well as a way for countries to communicate unspoken messages of goodwill to each other through international acts of propaganda.”
Rowan was asked whether he can ever view baseball the same way again after writing this book.
True, “once you have something infected on the hard drive of your mind, it’s hard to eliminate it,” the author said.
“I was an Orioles fan and a Cubs fan at one point in my life, but that’s almost become like a ghost memory,” he added.
Rowan also has a sequel to the book in mind.
“I still have 800-900 stories in my data base that haven’t been touched,” he said. “There are a couple of them that will just make you say, ‘No way!’ That’s the reaction I get all the time, and I say ‘Way!’ Just because you never heard it before doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
There is another purpose to the book, beyond using baseball and sports as an educational tool.
Rowan said the use of baseball to influence and manipulate people far beyond the ball diamond, in such areas as politics and war, should be lesson in the need for skepticism and objectivity.
“I love catching mental manipulation. We’re susceptible all the time. I just want people to be aware that something as simple as baseball can have much more significance than that,” he said.
“I’ve laid out where all the facts are,” he added. “When you start connecting the dots, it’s really interesting. Your eyes are open, and it’s more enjoyable not to be duped.
“I’m just bringing all of these stories up, saying ‘Guys, pay attention.'”
In other words, not only keep your eye on the ball, but what’s being pitched along with it.
