Soviet Baseball: History and Prospects
Editor’s Note: This article, originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 12, in 1992, was completed only weeks before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which accounts for references throughout to the U.S.S.R.
Among the ruins of Perestroika and of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the game of baseball is attempting to survive. like many ideas it was imposed from on high by the Soviet Government on a mostly disinterested public. Its survival will depend on whether what little the Soviet public has seen of baseball will create strong enough roots for it to continue without strong central government support and in the midst of an economy in complete disarray.
The recent surge of baseball interest in the Soviet Union is directly related to baseball being made an Olympic sport. However, the Russians have long played a traditional game called lapta which some Russians have claimed is the direct ancestor of baseball, and were even playing baseball for a short time during the 1930s.
Lapta, which can be traced back to the reign of Ivan the Terrible, is usually played between two teams of between 5 and 15 players each on a field that is 70-80 meters (77-87 yards) long and 30-40 meters (33-44 yards) wide. A 8-10 centimeter (3-4 inches) diameter soft ball is used which is hit with a stick (called lapta) some 70-80 centimeters (27-31 inches) in length and 3-3.5 centimeters (1.2-1.4 inches) in diameter. The batter attempts to hit the ball, which is pitched underhand by a player on the opposing team, as far as possible. While the ball is in flight, the batter runs from one end of the field to the other as many times as possible. The other side tries to get to the ball and return it to a teammate who can tag the runner. If the ball is caught in the air, or if the runner is hit by a ball thrown at him by the opposing team, the team switches sides. Each run counts as a point and the team that collects the most points in a fixed time period wins.
Even though the game resembles rounders much more than it does baseball, this has not stopped some Russians from claiming that it was the origin of the American Game. As recently as 1987, on July 4, no less, an S. Shachin in an article in the Soviet paper Izvestia claimed that lapta was brought to America by the first Russian settlers in the early 1800s, adopted by the Americans as baseball, “and has now returned to us in a different form and with a strange, foreign name.” Even the Soviet Government, however, no longer backs this claim. Lapta is not widely played anymore and is universally considered a children’s game.
The first real baseball was played during the inter-war years when thousands of Americans voluntarily went to the Soviet Union to work in the factories and to help the Great Socialist Experiment. As can be expected, whenever there is a group of Americans together for a period of time anywhere in the world, they will eventually play baseball. In the spring of 1933, the American workers residing in Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and Petrozavodsk introduced the game to the Soviet public.
The Moscow “Anglo-American” team staged an exhibition game at that city’s Dynamo Stadium which attracted 25,000 spectators according to the Moscow News. That paper also reported that the State Central Institute of Physical Culture in Moscow had made baseball part of its curriculum. In 1934, the Supreme Council of Physical Culture reported that native baseball teams had sprung up in Petrozavodsk, Kondopoga, Leningrad, Gorki and Erevan. In Erevan, the local Armenian youths reportedly learned the game in the early ’30s from Americans who worked on the Transcaucasia railroad and who left them all of their baseball equipment.
The first inter-city baseball game ever played in the Soviet Union was held on June 6, 1934 between the Americans who worked at the Gorki Auto Plant and the Moscow Foreign Worker’s Club in Dynamo Stadium. Moscow beat Gorki 16-5. By July 1934, the Moscow News could report that a list of popular sports in the U.S.S.R. would include baseball. Uniforms were being made by the Central Sports Equipment Laboratory at the Institute of Physical Culture, and other equipment was being produced at the Dynamo Sports Goods Factories in Moscow and Leningrad. Baseball was slated to be taken up by the Stalin (AMO) Auto Plant in Moscow in 1935, one of the two largest factories in Moscow. Teams of Soviet players were formed. The Moscow baseball team, with an appropriation of 8,000 rubles, was to have two out-of-town trips to Gorki and Petrozavodsk.
However, after the beginning of 1935, there is no further mention of baseball in the Soviet press and in fact there is no evidence of baseball being played since then in the U.S.S.R., until the 1980s. What happened? One could surmise that the Soviet’s sudden interest in the American game of baseball, besides being related to a large contingent of Americans in their midst, may be directly related to the United States’ recognition of the Soviet Union in November of 1933. After 1935, Russia was engulfed in the turmoil of the Communist purges and show trials. Nazi Germany was an immediate threat and the country was preparing for war.
The central authorities apparently saw no need to continue to support a foreign sport that did not directly contribute toward building a strong armed force as would parachute jumping, a frequently referred-to popular sport. During the war, which devastated the country, there was little sport of any kind. After World War II, when the Cold War set in, the Soviet newspapers labelled baseball as a “bad imperialist game.” Playing the American-as-apple-pie game of baseball in the Soviet Union in the 1950s would be the equivalent of raising the Communist flag in the deep South during the same time period. This hostility and ignorance toward baseball continued well into the 1980s.
The reintroduction of baseball in the U.S.S.R. is directly related to the decision in 1984 by the Olympic Committee to make baseball a gold medal sport starting with the 1992 Olympics. Since the Soviets did not want to forfeit the chance of obtaining additional gold medals, in 1985 the Central Sports Committee decided to encourage baseball on an organized basis. Once the informal ban on the game was removed, some Russian students immediately took up the new sport. They had developed their interest either through seeing the Cuban and Nicaraguan students play pick-up games at the universities in their country, or through travels abroad. It is not therefore surprising that the first organized Russian baseball teams arose at the universities.
At first the university students would play informal games with the Cuban and Nicaraguan students and their instructors were mostly Cuban. However, socialist camaraderie went only so far. Fidel Castro, the Los Angeles Times reported, once told the President of the International and U.S. Baseball Federation “We will help the Soviets to beat you, but never teach them enough to beat us.” As Perestroika and Glasnost took hold in the Soviet Union, the Russian baseball players had a chance to travel abroad and interact with players from other countries, especially those from the United States.
One of the best of the early teams was from D.L Mendelayev College of Chemical Technology. They won the Soviets’ first international game in the Summer of 1987 when they beat a Czechoslovakian team in Tbilisi, Georgia. On June 1, 1988, the first baseball game with a visiting American team in the U.S.S.R. was played in Moscow by the Johns Hopkins University Blue Jays who faced the Mendelayev team. The first run and hit by the Russians were made by Aleksei Koshevoy. He scored on two stolen bases and a wild pitch. This trip was reciprocated in October of 1988, when the Mendelayev club became the first Soviet baseball team to visit the United States. They came for a three-game, two-week tour. And they were predictably slaughtered.
The first game was played on October 12, 1988 against the same Johns Hopkins University team that had visited Moscow. The Soviets lost 16-0 in a no-hitter and committed six errors in the first inning alone. They continued to lose the next two games by large scores. This, however, did not dampen their enthusiasm for the game. Vadim Kulakov, the team’s 22-year-old catcher, worshipped Gary Carter so much that he wore his number 8 and curled his hair like Carter. He told the New York Times that he considered that his real age was one, since that was how long he had been playing the game. ”The game”, he told the paper, “once you begin to see how much is in it, how everything changes every second, is like no other. It is as though it is from another planet.”
Unfortunately, emphasis and financial support has been directed almost solely to the national team of Olympic hopefuls. In 1986, the All-Union Baseball, Softball and Russian Lapta Federation was formed. The following year they organized a national squad. In order to encourage participation, the Red Army offered to release from military duty any serviceman who volunteered to play for the national team. In 1988, team members received a weekly salary of 238 rubles ($368) which at that time was more than the average Soviet worker might earn. Although the national team does receive financial help from the government, most of the support, instruction and equipment has come from the United States. In February 1988, Soviet coaches Alexander Ardatov and Guela Chikhradze, visited the U.S. for three weeks as guests of the U.S. Baseball Federation to learn about baseball. They visited major league spring training camps and also some colleges and high schools.
The first, and so far only baseball stadium in the Soviet Union, a 1,000 seat, $3.2 million field was built with funds donated by Dr. Shigeyshi Matsumae, president of Tokai University in Japan. Most of the equipment the team uses has been donated by American manufacturers or by American corporations in return for sponsorship rights when the national team travels to the U.S. When the national team toured the United States in April 1989, they were sponsored by Taco Bell. The players’ uniforms were paid for by Taco Bell and had Taco Bell patches on the sleeves, and all the team’s other equipment came from the United States. The players made numerous publicity stops at Taco Bells along the way, sometimes chanting for the T.V. cameras “Da, Da, Taco Bell.”
The national team did poorly against the U.S. College teams they played. They played their first U.S. game against the U.S. Naval Academy on April 11, 1989 and lost 21-1. At the end of their three-week, ten-game tour they displayed an 0-11 record. The next year they participated in the Goodwill Games in Seattle, Washington and lost all five games they played against the U.S., Mexican, Japanese and Puerto Rican teams by a combined score of 67-5, making 20 errors in the process.
The national team had been making some progress before the attempted coup on August 18, 1991. In 1990, the team won the Group B European Baseball Championships beating such teams as Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and West Germany. This gave them the right to participate in the August 1991 Group A European Baseball Championships in Italy which would determine the European team to play in the Olympics. However, the Soviets lost to France in their first game and were thus promptly eliminated from the 1992 Olympics.
Baseball, like so much else in the Soviet Union is following two separate paths. In determining the future of the game in that country, each path must be considered separately. The first level is the national team training for the Olympics, and it faces severe challenges like many other Soviet institutions. It has been split by nationalism. Two top pitchers from the Soviet Republic of Georgia quit after regional flare-ups. Before Lithuania became a separate republic, a star pitcher from that area had to quit because he refused to wear the national team uniform stating they would kill him in Lithuania if he wore it.
Since the Central Government is disintegrating no one knows who will provide financial support for the national team. In addition, no one on the team has been playing baseball for more than five years and all team members started playing in their teens or later. To be competitive in baseball, one must usually start playing it when less than ten years old, a fact that even the Russian coaches admit. It is thus unlikely that any Soviet baseball team will play in the Olympics until the next century.
The prospects on the grassroots level are much brighter. It is here that the future of Russian baseball rests. In an interview for this article held in November, 1991, Khalik Feiskhanov, head coach of the Moscow State University team stated that those Soviets who see the game really like it. “More and more children and adults are coming out to play and watch baseball and get some exercise. People like it because anyone can play at any age and make a field anyplace. Everything points to baseball growing and developing.”
The major problem, which he and all other Soviet coaches quickly point out is the lack of equipment. ”Youth programs are stunted because of this,” he told us. Another major problem is the shortage of press coverage. The major sport in the U.S.S.R. is soccer. Baseball, with about 13,500 players nationwide playing before an average of a few hundred fans, is not deemed newsworthy enough. Mr. Feiskhanov decries the lack of publicity. ‘We need to get more people to hear about baseball in Moscow, come to see a game, and get to understand the athletic-intellectual combination required for the sport.”
The Soviets have joined the Little League movement and Mr. Feiskhanov is working on a plan to have American Little Leaguers and six coaches visit Moscow for a joint two-week summer camp.
Baseball as an organized sport in the Soviet Union can only survive if their youngsters are willing to try it and stick with it. The enthusiasm of the players is there. It is up to the Soviet Government or the government of the successor republics to provide a stable environment in order to allow the game to grow.
KIM STEVEN JUHASE is an attorney-at-law in New York City and Executive Editor of the New York International Law Review.
BLAIR A. RUBLE is Executive Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D. C.