Baseball Flourishes in the USSR

"... for a brief time in the 1930s, it appears that baseball was going to take off in Soviet Russia. In the spring of 1933, American workers living in Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and Petrozavodsk organized games. A team dubbed the Moscow Anglo-Americans drew 25,000 spectators to an exhibition game at the city's famed Dynamo stadium, according to the *Moscow News.* The next year, baseball classes were opened at Moscow's Physiculture Institute. the game was being taaught by Americans and a Russia who learned to play in Japan. The Soviet's Supreme Council of Physical Culture even reported extensive baseball growth with teams springing up in Petrozavodsk, Kondopoga, Leningrad, Gorki and Erevan. Inter-city competition began on 6 June 1934 with the Moscow Foreign Worker's Club beating the Gorki Auto Plant 16–5 in an all–American tilt at Dynamo Stadium. Along with the company teams, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Bullitt, assembled squads from the U.S. diplomatic corps. Maybe Bullitt, who was a close friend of Sigmund Freud and would also become an outspoken anticommunist, was trying to subtly push baseball on the Soviets. Whatever the case, the ambassador ordered equipment for four teams-—there would be two made up of embassy staff and two others comprised of americans in Russia. Bullitt, who was 43 in 1934, agreed to play for one of the teams. His greatest piece of diplomacy on the issue: he secured the use of a field from the Soviet government. The 1935 season was shaping up to be a big one. Uniforms were being made by the Central Sports Equipment Laboratory at the Institute of Physical Culture, and the Dynamo Sports Good Factories in Moscow and Leningrad were producing other equipment. One Moscow team had a budget of 8,000 rubles and scheduled two out-of-town baseball trips. Even the Stalin Auto Plant in Moscow, which was one of the country's biggest factories, had plans to start a team.

"Alas, the efforts of Bullitt and other Americans failed, as baseball seemed to be wiped off the Soviet sporting landscape faster than it took for it to become popular. What happened? In their article “Soviet Baseball: History and Prospects,” Kim Steven Juhas and Blair A. Ruble suggested that the rise and fall of baseball in this era mirrored the prevailing politics of this turbulent time. In November 1933, the United States recognized the Soviet Union. That fact plus the large number of Americans in the country at the time made baseball palatable to the communists' sporting culture. but Juhas and Ruble point out that "[a]fter 1935 Russia was engulfed in the turmoil of communist purges and show trials. Nazi Germany was preparing for war. The central authorities apparently saw no need to continue to support a foreign sport that did not directly contirubute toward building a strong armed force as would parachute jumping, a frequently referred-to poular sport..."

https://books.google.com/books?id=USi7PA151vIC&pg=PA129

(I see some parallels here to my post on jazz, which was widespread in the USSR in 1932-35 and then declined amidst the purge trials and suspicion of all things foreign in the later 1930's. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/bQWnpTFdTQ0/kzFIYZBKJdMJ)

Did Soviet baseball have to die, though? The reasoning that it didn't contribute directly to the national defense may be fallacious. Finland has its own variant of baseball, called Pesäpallo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesäpallo and, according to a Finnish friend of mine, it "was specifically adopted for national defense, and it was very closely linked to the training of the paramilitary Civil Guards! Pitching was training for grenade-throwing, diving to the base was diving for cover or diving for trench, and so on. Shouldn't be too difficult for the Komsomol to notice the same..."

Of course you can say it was just too foreign, in an era (the late 1930's--and again in the Cold War after 1945) when foreign, western, and especially American things were viewed with suspicion. But remember that another "western" game--basketball, which was invented by a Canadian and had mostly flourished in the US--eventually became popular in the USSR. And the Cold War actually stimulated the Soviets to prove that "we can beat the Americans at the game they invented." https://books.google.com/books?id=pGdOCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA129 Couldn't the same thing have been true about baseball? (And further proof that anti-Americanism need not be an obstacle to baseball: Japanese baseball went on even when the country was at war with the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Baseball_League)
 
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I think there are a couple things we can take from the Finnish experience on this that are relevant. One, Finland had a history of similar games like baseball being played already when pesäpallo was introduced - kuningaspallo, for example, that was already played in the 19th century. Russia has a ball game that has an even longer history - lapta (or Russian rounders). It is a game some in Russia think actually influenced in the development of baseball in the first place. In the Soviet Union, there was an effort to develop lapta into a modern ballgame. It was (and is) played nationally by thousands but it was apparently not as successful as the development and spread of pesäpallo in Finland.

Two, Lauri Pihkala, the developer of pesäpallo, could be said to have been an excellent marketer for his new sport, selling it to the Civil Guards, the Lotta Svärd and sports societies, etc, as an intrinsically Finnish and patriotic game in the 1920s. Without the efforts of this one man who rose to a significant position in the Finnish national sports administration, pesäpallo would have never developed and been popularized as it was. Pesäpallo was an unlikely national success story and it is still a significant sport in Finland, especially in the countryside, to the constant horror of those who would have Finns rather play international sports like football, ice hockey and even American football and American baseball.

So, maybe what we would need would be one or several "Pihkalas" for the USSR - people who would develop a new, distinctly Russian and Soviet game out of lapta and baseball, and who would be in the position to popularize it among the Soviet people. This should include someone with an access Lenin's and Stalin's ears and good connections to the Red Army leadership as well.

Oh, and a nitpick on your depiction of Finnish baseball - grenade-throwing was not practiced by pitching, unless one wants to throw the grenade three meters vertically into the air, having it land at their own feet...;) Grenade-throwing was rather practiced by throwing the ball between bases or throwing it back home from the outfield.
 
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Dude, I would love a true Soviet-baseball timeline. I think that we would need a slightly different Soviet Union, such as a pragmatist pro NEP successor instead of Trotsky or Stalin. A USSR looking to trade with the west, if WW2 is averted, can with the right butterflies forge a very close relationship with the US plus the love of baseball.

The USSR's population is so large that if baseball took off we would get some fantastic players, and we would see real competition between East and West, as I am not convinced the West would be so much better that they would simply take all the good Russian players.
 

Asami

Banned
Dude, I would love a true Soviet-baseball timeline. I think that we would need a slightly different Soviet Union, such as a pragmatist pro NEP successor instead of Trotsky or Stalin. A USSR looking to trade with the west, if WW2 is averted, can with the right butterflies forge a very close relationship with the US plus the love of baseball.

The USSR's population is so large that if baseball took off we would get some fantastic players, and we would see real competition between East and West, as I am not convinced the West would be so much better that they would simply take all the good Russian players.

The World Series would actually be a World Series. Best American team vs. Best Soviet team.

2016 - Chicago defeats Leningrad, ending a 108 year curse? :p
 
Totally sweet. Plus, tons of Korean and Japanese players would probably make the leap to the USSR simply because of proximity. This makes their sport even more talent-laden, as many great Korean and Japanese players never developed their talents at the highest levels.

Plus, if this culturally has some sort of effect on Asia on general (like J-Pop influenced K-Pop, which now is copied throughout Asia) the floodgates of talent would be unleashed. Perhaps by now China would have a league coming into its own and by the end of the 21st century would have the most competitive baseball league.
 
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I try to imagine the Baseball world championship

were US play again USSR in Finals
with Fidel Castor playing for "Leningrad Bears"
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Facing George H. Bush from "YALE team"
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World War II might have to be avoided, or ay least it's escalation after the defeat of France. If France falls, then the Soviet Union is always going to be the next target for the Nazis. It is debatable how effective Stalin's policies were, but the USSR definitely had to get a lot done to have been anything near ready for 1941. A more 'moderate' figure taking over after Lenin managing a solid alliance with France and Britain against threats of a mutually ruinous war could nip Nazi Germany in the bud and allow recovery from the Great Depression to continue. And with no purges, and no rampant militarism on the scale of the Cold War, sports like baseball could absorb the competitive spirit.

God I want this TL.
 
The World Series would actually be a World Series. Best American team vs. Best Soviet team.

2016 - Chicago defeats Leningrad, ending a 108 year curse? :p

That was my thought. Imagine how insanely popular the World Series would be, post-WWII through the fall of the Soviet Union. This definitely lends itself to a timeline of its own, with an annual series between the American champ and the Soviet champ, probably alternating in location each year. Minor leagues would probably appear throughout east Asia and Europe and eventually compete with these two leagues or act as feeder systems. Imagine the World Series with the U.S., Russia, Europe, China, Japan/South Korea crossover, former Soviet bloc, and maybe two other leagues having a postseason tournament with their respective champions. Or what if big league teams from either America or Russia make new homes in other parts of the world, switching leagues? It would be baseball, not basketball, challenging soccer for the top spot in the world's sports scene.
 

Bulldoggus

Banned
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Hall of Fame Catcher Vladislav Tretiak grins while displaying the Soviet Series and Olympic medals won in his legendary 20-year career with the Moscow Reds and USSR.
 
GO BIG RED!

Probably be like the Magical Magyars of Football fame in Hungary, being innovative to make up for their being new to the sport, initially stunning the Baseball establishment with their fresh approach.
 
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