Bob Bestler | North brought baseball South

I've wanted to say something positive about the 150th anniversary of the Civil War without getting all schmaltzy. Finally I found something.

The North introduced baseball to the South during the Civil War and 150 years later the South Carolina Gamecocks are the defending champions of the college baseball world.

OK, I skipped a few steps between those events.

The Civil War marriage of baseball and the South has been spelled out by College of Charleston President Alex Sanders in a speech prepared for Baseball Hall of Fame celebrations in July. Sanders' grandfather fought for the Confederacy and that fact, along with his lifelong love of baseball, turned him into an expert on the subject.

Some points in his speech, which is available online:

Abner Doubleday, still considered by many, including baseball commissioner Bud Selig, as the man who invented the game, was at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. He was reported to be the first Union soldier to fire at Confederates who had bombarded the fort.

Because of Doubleday's role that day, there has always been a rumor that home plate in baseball was shaped for Fort Sumter. It's a cute idea, but no such evidence exists.

Before the Civil War, baseball was played mostly in the North. Many Confederate soldiers "were introduced to the game by watching their Union counterparts play baseball in Southern prison camps.''

The first baseball game played below the Mason-Dixon line was at Hilton Head Island, where thousands of Confederate prisoners were held. Their attendance at a game between two Union batteries - involuntary as it was - brought total attendance to 41,000, then the largest crowd ever to watch a sporting event.

One of the game's greatest hitters, Shoeless Joe Jackson of Greenville, said he learned how to swing a bat from a Confederate veteran who had learned how to play baseball in a Union prison camp.

Sanders said he could find only one instance in which the Union soldiers and Confederate soldiers actually faced off against each other in a baseball game.

It was at Appomattox, Va., a game between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia played immediately after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

"Baseball," Sanders wrote, "became a remarkable substitute for war."

After the war, baseball became a favorite sport in the South. Although the South never had a major league team until the Houston Colt .45s in 1962, it became the home of minor league teams and high school and college baseball, Negro Leagues, youth leagues, textile baseball and sandlot baseball. Several of the greatest players, including Jackson and Ty Cobb, were Southern-born.

To top it off, I understand that today, just 150 years after the War Between the States, some Southerners actually cheer for the Yankees. Who would have thought?