CAIRO — During the tour-bus caravan to Giza and the Pyramids, two British friends of mine sat near an American who recited that widespread legend of how the Sphinx lost its nose and  tsk-tsk’d the members of British military for daring to use the Sphinx for target practice.  Thanks to me, my friends were armed with a response.

That may be so, they said, but it was Americans who pelted it with baseballs.

Timed my reading of Mark Lamster’s delightful retelling of baseball’s first globe trot, Spalding’s World Tour, so that I was reading about Cap Anson, Albert Spalding, John Ward and the other baseball tourist’s visit to Egypt and Cairo at the same time as mine. In October 1888, a band of ballplayers, led by former pitcher and then sporting goods magnate Spalding, began a trip around the world to promote baseball as America’s game and a game for the entire globe. They were, in effect, Johnny Appleseeds of the seams — spreading the game with exhibitions from Hawaii to Australia to Paris and to London, and not-so-subtly sowing seeds for the expansion of Spalding’s sporting goods business. One of their stops was Egypt, where they played a game in the shadow of the pyramids.

Lamster describes the ballplayers’ post-game visit to the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx:

The shenanigans opened with a competition to throw a baseball over Cheops (note: the largest of the Giza pyramids). Chicago catcher Tom Daly was dispatched to the far side of the giant tomb to receive any successful attempts. But, as Ward wrote, “he had no opportunity to distinguish himself, as the height of the pyramid” — 451 feet — “made a farce of the whole proceeding.” …

The players’ final engagement … was a last look at the Sphinx. … The colossus had taken its share of abuse over the years — Ancient Greek and Roman travelers tagged it with graffiti, a militant sheik knock off its nose in 1496, and a British army colonel had recently bored a series of holes in its flanks to find out whether it was hollow — and now a team of American ballplayers imposed their own indignity. One by one, they tested their throwing accuracy, hurling baseballs at statue’s right eye. Only James Fogarty proved a successful marksman.

Spalding's globe-trotting baseball All-Stars, perched around and on the Sphinx.

The tourists played a game on Feb. 9, 1889, with the Great Pyramid as a backdrop, looming behind home plate, with the Sphinx in foul territory down the third-base line and with tombs buried below the players’ cleats. It was an area I was sure to retrace as best I could during the visit.

Throughout the vacation, I tried to keep track of baseball’s presence abroad, from the ‘Mazing Mets leather jacket a guy was wearing in the Barcelona subway (World Champions 1969, stitched in) to the ubiquitous New York Yankees stuff. Finding international revenue and talent streams beyond the Americas has been a gathering theme for much of the past decade in baseball, highlighted by but hardly limited to the arrival of Japanese stars like Ichiro and the World Baseball Classic. Locally, the Cardinals have revived and strengthened their Caribbean campuses and scouting and expanded their scouting and interest in Asia’s major leagues. They signed a player from Hungary’s national baseball program, the first player from his country signed to a professional baseball contract. The Pittsburgh Pirates have two Indian pitchers (nee javelin throwers fresh from a made-for-TV competition) coming to spring training, and there have been Major League Baseball-sponsored coaching programs in India, China and elsewhere. The World Baseball Classic, which will have its second turn this March, is viewed as baseball’s biggest international pitch — with some officials publicly dreaming that they hope it becomes baseball’s answer to soccer’s World Cup. Aspirations of such global grandeur aside, the WBC’s intent — both financial and philosophical (probably in that order) — is clear.

“The 2009 World Baseball Classic will further demonstrate the remarkable global growth of our game,” MLB commissioner Bud Selig recently said.

During the trip, I saw plenty of Yankees hats, of course, including a couple pink ones for sale in Malta (priced to move at 3,50 Euro, each). A mannequin on the cruise ship taking us places wore a New York Mets hat throughout the trip. Never really got an explanation. There were a few Phillies hats around, including one old-school one walking along La Rambla, and an Atlanta Braves cap or two. An author I know likes to describe baseball’s royalty with a caps-in-a-crowd rule: How many baseball caps from that team do you see in crowd shots from around the world? From Vatican City to Tokyo? Yankees. Boston. Of course. The St. Louis Cardinals, usually, though I saw more Milwaukee Brewers caps (two) than Cardinals caps (one) on this trip.

But fashion is different than fanaticism.

Of the 16 teams in this year’s World Baseball Classic, only two are from Europe (Italy and The Netherlands; the latter being mostly represented by Curacao) and one from Africa (South Africa). Broadening the pool of teams will certainly help broaden baseball’s appeal — as more than just apparel. Spain won the most recent European Baseball U-21 championships, clobbering Italy, 11-2, in the title game of the tournament. The year before, Spain hosted the 30th European Baseball Championship tournament in the Barcelona area and The Netherlands won. It was the nation’s fifth consecutive title. Spain finished third in that 2007 tournament, with its best performance since 1955, according to reports.

It was near one of the fields that played host to the 2007 tournament that tragedy occurred near the start of our trip. High winds swept through Spain and France on Jan. 24, and 100-mph winds strafed the Barcelona area. In one of the suburbs, Sant Boi de Llobregat (boyhood home of the NBA’s Pau Gasol), more than a dozen children — ages 9 to 16, according to report — were preparing to take the field for baseball practice that Saturday morning. With the wind whipping, the children and coaches sought shelter nearby. As they waited out the wind, the wall of the town’s sports center collapsed on them. Four children were killed and a handful more were injured. Two of the adult coaches were also injured. A moment of silence was held at that night’s FC Barcelona game. About 2,500 people attended services for the four children, and that group included members of the local baseball team.

A Google Earth picture of the area shows the lovely baseball field the team and kids call home.

It’s impossible to transition comfortably from such tragedy back to the topic presented in this blog. Please forgive as I try. While reading and hearing about this it struck me that baseball was clearly important to the children, the sports center, to the community and also that it was mentioned so matter-of-factly. The children were there to play baseball, and baseball is obviously going to be a part of the community’s healing.

That has to be a part of any sport’s global outreach: The bond of the sport. Jerseys and hats and exhibition games (or even regular-season games, like in baseball, the NHL and NFL), are swell. But if the WBC is to ever reach the heights of the World Cup, baseball has to do more than move merchandise.

It has to move people.

Mark Lamster's excellent book, "Spalding's World Tour"

That was a goal of Spalding’s World Tour, as presented in Lamster’s book. Sure, Spalding set out to find new locales of sales of his sporting goods, but he also sought to present baseball as a game the whole globe could play. While the Olympics and first World Baseball Classic have now revealed that baseball hardly belongs exclusively to America — certainly not when it comes to success — back then Spalding set off to showcase baseball as truly America’s game. Yet he never wanted to do so at the cost of other national games, such as cricket.

“Spalding also understood that he must at all costs avoid setting up America’s national game in opposition to that of England,” Lamster writes. “If baseball was seen as mounting a challenge to cricket, it would never get a fair shake from patriotic (Brits). And so from the outset Spalding advertised baseball as a supplement to and not a replacement for the English sport.”

Spalding was also careful not to present baseball as a cousin of the English sport, distant or otherwise.

Pharoah Thutmose III: The first slugger?

One of the underlying themes of the World Tour and Lamster’s book is the search for the origin of baseball — and the various camps that drove their stakes in deep to one legend or another. Some, like the player Ward, believed that baseball was completely and originally an American game, invented and perfected on these shores. As Lamster quotes, Ward allowed for the possibility of international influences on baseball but “it is none the less distinctively our own.” Others saw it as an evolution of cricket or the other English bat-and-ball game — rounders. That caused from frustration with the baseball intelligentsia who knew rounders was viewed as a children’s game. The tourists were aware of that as they took the game to England in 1889 and were faced with a British press that needled them, and therefore their country, for playing a child’s game. Spalding himself would later sell the Abner Doubleday myth as baseball’s birth. It’s a tale with far more staying power than truth.

Why just five years ago, The New York Times presented one Egyptologist’s argument that baseball has roots back at these pyramids, where maybe Spalding’s game wasn’t the first played in that desert. Wrote Bruce Webber about a lecturer and his “Pharoah at the Bat” presentation:

No disrespect meant to Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright or anybody else who might claim responsibility for the game we call baseball, but Thutmose III had them beat by, oh, three millennia or so. Thutmose ruled Egypt during the 15th century B.C., and is the first known pharaoh to have depicted himself in a ritual known as ‘’seker-hemat,” which Peter A. Piccione has loosely translated as ”batting the ball.” The context he’s referring to is a wall relief at the shrine of Hathor, the goddess of love and joy, in Hatshepsut’s temple … where Thutmose is seen holding a softball-size ball in one hand and a long stick, wavy at the end, in the other. The hieroglyphic over the scene reads: ”Batting the ball for Hathor, who is foremost in Thebes.” The date is circa 1475 B.C.

Go figure.

About the time our bus passed by a pickup cricket game in Alexandria, my British friends were informing an American or two that American baseballs as well as British bullets bruised the Sphinx. They knew this because we got to talking about baseball a few nights before. They knew a little about the game — faint notions of the way to play and the teams. But they asked for details. I obliged. I told them some stories, about the World Tour and the Sphinx. But in the midst of my description of the rules, one of them stopped me. More than a century since Spalding’s tourists visited and the reaction remains the same.

“Why, that sounds a lot like,” he said, “what we call rounders.”

***

The above entry was written over several days, from Feb. 2 to Feb. 5, 2009, while traveling, but polished and posted this weekend when I could get consistent access to an Internet feed. It revolves around a visit to Cairo and Giza on Feb. 2, 2009, but includes anecdotes from a cruise through the Mediterranean.

***

Our new baseball radio show, “THE HOT CORNER”, debuts Sunday morning on 101ESPN (101.1 FM here in St. Louis). Streaming is available at the station’s official web site — can’t miss the big golden button there on the right when you follow this link. 101ESPN’s Cardinals reporter Brian Feldman and I will host the show from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. St. Louis time starting this Sunday and every Sunday through the baseball season. Apparently, we’ll have plenty of things to talk about during the first show, and that’s before we have a few folks on as guests.

***

And now, this week, back to the content you’ve come to expect from the blog. Dispatches from spring training begin Thursday …

-30-