In “The Obvious Child” — the lead single from Paul Simon’s 1990 Rhythm of the Saints album — the iconic songwriter sings “The cross is in the ballpark.” It’s a striking and unexpected image in the flow of the song, and it has always seemed to me a sharp encapsulation of several intertwined threads of American life, including religion, race and, of course, baseball.
In The Worldly Game: The Story of Baseball in the Amana Colonies (January 2024), Dr. Monys A. Hagen offers an in-depth look at the intersection of religion and baseball (and, to a lesser extent, race) in the Amanas.
Making extensive use of oral histories, Hagen follows the history of the American Pastime in the Amana Colonies from its days as an activity declared verboten by the Elders of the Community of True Inspiration (the German religious order that founded what was then called Amana Colony in 1855) to the game’s irrepressible and important role in building community pride and connection.
Along the way, we meet a range of individuals, from a pair of doctors who advocated for the game despite the Elders misgivings to Bill Zuber, the most famous ballplayer to hail from Amanas. Zuber pitched for the Cleveland Indians, the Washington Senators, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox during a Major League Baseball career that stretched from 1936 to 1947.
Hagan’s research certainly demonstrates the ways in which baseball served as a conduit to “the world” the Elders so disapproved of. The research also turned up examples of the ways in which the community’s religious views impacted its approach to baseball — perhaps most notably in a passage about George Clark, a Black man from outside the community who became a player/manager of an Amana team with great success in 1935. Hagan argues that the community’s religious and communal underpinnings made this possible.
“The Amana Church and its people genuinely embraced the Christian principles of love, respect for others, and charity toward all; racial discrimination stood antithetical to their belief system. Furthermore, racism with its social hierarchy and explicit view of superiority and inferiority ran counter to the society’s communal foundation. Amana people also understood the sting of prejudice.”
It perhaps goes without saying that the Amanas — like the whole of American society then and now — were not free from racial prejudice, but the story of George Clark still stands out as a powerful moment of members of two marginalized communities finding common ground in baseball.
The Worldly Game is published by Iowa City’s Penfield Books, which was founded in 1979 to distribute books of interest to people of a range of ethnicities, including those of German descent. The book may well be of interest to those who trace their roots to Germany, but it is also a treat for any reader interested in Iowa history, baseball history, or the truly robust history of baseball in Iowa.
The text might have benefited from another round of proofreading, and Hagen does have a tendency to write in a somewhat circular manner, which leads to some repetitive passages that slow the book’s forward momentum. Given the book’s grounding in oral histories, I expected deeper dives into the individual personalities Hagan mentions; the book is much more of a tick-tock than it is a collection of profiles. More of the latter might have helped draw readers into the book’s account of the community and its love of baseball.
While The Worldly Game may not be a home run, but it is, at the very least, a line drive single up the middle.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s April 2024 issue.
