Miller: Star-Spangled Banner, baseball forever linked
From Doug Miller at MLB.com on September 13, 2014, with mention of SABR member John Thorn:
Francis Scott Key never got to see a big league baseball game. He died in 1843, some 26 years before the first professional team was established. But you can imagine his joy if he did get that chance. These days, he’d probably sit in a shiny bleacher seat, waiting for a batting-practice homer with a soft, weathered glove raised high … in his non-writing hand. Maybe he’d inhale a hot dog while jotting down a few pretty lines for his next song. That would come about an hour before he’d hear the iconic bars of his first one, which, contrary to American lore, does not end with the words, “Play Ball.” Odds are he’d be pretty happy at the twilight’s last gleaming.
This weekend, the celebration of the 200th anniversary of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is on, and Key’s memory is being rightly feted for his poetic description from the “dawn’s early light” of Sept. 14, 1814, at the height of the War of 1812.
Hours after being stuck on a ship in Baltimore Harbor as the British pounded Fort McHenry in the Battle of Baltimore, Key saw the skies clear from the smoke and the indelible image that “our flag was still there.”
The verses were called “The Defence of Fort M’Henry,” and it was put to the tune of “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a British drinking song purportedly written by John Stafford Smith that had been composed more than 30 years earlier and served as the theme of the Anacreontic Society of London, a men’s club of amateur musicians.
Soon after Key wrote the words, a local newspaper gave it the title “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and in 1931, it became our official anthem. All the while, another grand tradition steeped in collective nostalgia and American togetherness — the game of baseball — was steaming along, gaining prominence in our country’s conscience.
Not surprisingly, the national anthem and the National Pastime became stitched together forever, like red laces in white horsehide.
According to John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, the playing of the national anthem before big league games did not become an everyday tradition until 1942. Taking that into account (and including a slight margin of error based on the lack of documentation regarding split doubleheaders in the earlier days), the Star-Spangled Banner has been heard right before the first pitch of at least the last 121,000 games. Oh, say can you see, indeed.
So with that in mind, 200 years after the night a 35-year-old Washington, D.C.-based attorney known to friends as Frank found himself under a war-torn sky, with honor in his heart and a pen in his hand, we go around the horn with nine things to know about “The Star-Spangled Banner” and its now-eternal link to the national pastime.
Read the full article here: http://m.mlb.com/news/article/94215622/star-spangled-banner-forever-linked-with-baseball-turns-200
Originally published: September 15, 2014. Last Updated: September 15, 2014.