Ruck ties sports to social history

With spring training just around the corner, it’s time to turn attention back to baseball. And… With spring training just around the corner, it’s time to turn attention back to baseball. And if there’s one man who knows a thing or two about the great American past time, it’s Rob Ruck.

The Pitt history professor, who teaches courses on American history and the history of sports, has made a career researching and teaching the role that sports play in American culture and society.

“I think sport is a fascinating thing to study and teach,” he said. “My students are far more knowledgeable and interested in sports than some other things.”

He also noted that discussing sports is “a great way to talk about a lot of different things – whether it’s class or race [or] the way in which sport has been penetrated by global capitalism. These are all things I think people ought to be studying and thinking about in the context of history. But sport’s a great way to slide people into thinking about these sorts of things.”

While never seeking the spotlight, Ruck did gain notoriety at a rather young age.

“So I’m on spring break my sophomore year, and I ended up getting arrested in a police riot that led to me and four other people being dubbed ‘The Pittsburgh Five,'” Ruck said.

“This was a police riot that grew out of some arrests that had occurred at a demonstration, a vigil against the [Vietnam] war and against the draft. We came back here [to Pittsburgh], defended ourselves and eventually did not go to jail.”

Ruck, who has lived in Pittsburgh since he was 10, was able to experience the culture of the area that revolved largely around professional sports teams like the Steelers and the Pirates.

As a graduate student at Pitt focusing on labor history, Ruck learned about the effects that sports had on nearly every aspect of life for Pittsburghers.

“One of the things that was evident in the way that David Montgomery, who was the main labor historian here, taught labor history was that it wasn’t just about unions and strikes and work, it was about working people and their lives here in the neighborhood and at home; it was about their attitudes. And that included sport,” he said.

One day while running through Frick Park with a friend, the sight of the U.S. Steel mill in Homestead reminded Ruck of an old Negro League baseball team that used to play there called the Homestead Grays.

Ruck knew little more than the team’s name and decided to research the history of the Grays and other Negro League teams in Pittsburgh.

“We didn’t know much about them,” admits Ruck. “There hadn’t been much written about them in those days.”

Ruck’s research on the role of sports in the black community eventually turned into a book titled “Sandlot Seasons.” The book explores the importance of sports in the black community “before integration, when there was a separate Negro league,” Ruck said.

“What I wanted to get at was the role and meaning that sport had played in the black community – before integration, before black athletes are embraced and take center stage. Because as that happens, the black community loses control over its own sporting life,” Ruck said.

“One of the things that had happened when I was studying the great Negro League teams in Pittsburgh, the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, was the realization that they fit into a larger sporting world.”

Despite the segregation and discrimination present in American society, Ruck notes that “there was this amazing network of grassroots community teams, sandlot teams, which the white community had, too. Because I think that until the age of television, after World War II, the Steelers and the Pirates didn’t matter as much to white and black people around here as all of their community teams, of which there were hundreds of baseball teams and scores of football teams every season.”

Ruck believes that the success of today’s sports franchises could not have been possible without community-based sports teams.

“These teams and these individuals are all coming out of a grassroots, bottom-up network of sandlot and community institutions. The Grays, the Crawfords and the Steelers were all sandlot clubs that became professional icons,” he said.

The popularity of baseball allowed local players to gain both national and international exposure.

“Negro League teams traveled around the country playing other black clubs, but they also played far more games against white teams than black teams. Even though the majors are segregated, they played the white sandlot and semi-pro teams,” Ruck said. “Dizzy Dean, Satchel Paige and Bob Feller would take teams of black and white professionals on barnstorming trips, because in those days you had to work in the off-season.

“But part of that sporting world was the Caribbean, that since early in the 20th century, black players had been playing in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Venezuela,” Ruck explained.

In fall 2001, Ruck started work on a documentary based on his book “The Tropic of Baseball” about the first generation of Dominican Major League players in the United States, which included Felipe Alou, Juan Marichal and Manny Mota.

The racism experienced by black athletes led many to move to the Caribbean to play baseball, where the effects of racism were not as strongly felt.

One of the most important factors drawing American baseball players to the Dominican Republic was integration.

“The racism, while there was racism, was different. These guys were treated well. They’re not living in segregated hotels, they’re not moving to the back of the bus. They were stars down there,” Ruck said.

“The more interaction people have with each other, the better they are with each other. Major League Baseball segregates in the 1890s at a time of rising racialism around the country, Plessy v. Ferguson legitimates separate but equal, you have an increase in lynchings and terror in the South, blacks are driven off the voting rolls, everybody’s thinking about other people in terms of social Darwinism and baseball segregates,” he said.

“But on the streets of an immigrant and working class community, like the Hill, you often have impressive degrees of interaction, particularly among kids. So you would have older black and white people telling me stories when I was interviewing them in the late ’70s and early ’80s [saying] ‘when we got in trouble, we’d get a whooping from our black mama and our white mama.'”

Ruck said that “the more organized it gets, the more people are driven apart and have to be black or white. But they still played against each other.”

In 1994, Ruck made a documentary called “Kings on the Hill,” which detailed the Negro League and the role of sports in the black community. Ruck used Pittsburgh “to tell the story of the Negro Leagues to tell this larger story. Pittsburgh really was the crossroads,” he said.

Negro League baseball teams like the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords brought national attention to Western Pennsylvania and made Pittsburgh one of the centers for sports as early as the 1930s. Ruck called the 1937 Pittsburgh Crawfords team “the best team, black or white, that was ever put together.”

That team included multiple future Hall of Famers and was actually made up of kids from two different schools in the Hill that were integrated.

“In 1937 that team was torn apart, because Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and several other guys went down to play in the Dominican Republic,” said Ruck.

In spite of the racism of the time, Pittsburgh still established itself as a center for athletic excellence. However, these professional franchises owe much of their success to their predecessors: the sandlot and community-based sports teams.

“You can go out to areas all around Western Pennsylvania and talk to old men who played semi-pro baseball, and their game of the year would be if the Grays or the Crawfords would come. People would proudly say ‘Satchel Paige struck me out, and I couldn’t even see the ball!'”

Ruck notes that it was not just baseball that established community bonds.

“Sports like boxing, football and track and field served an important function in the community as both a symbol and a means of social interaction,” he said.

“Sport serves as a way to tell a story about ourselves and to feel good about ourselves. But it’s also a status, it’s a story you tell other people.”

“I think of all the cities in the United States, no city has used sport as much as Pittsburgh to tell its story to the world. Once people thought about Pittsburgh in terms of steel, now it’s the Steelers. What makes this particularly fascinating, is that, with the exceptions of New York and Chicago, there is not a city in the 20th century that has had the level of success in sport that Pittsburgh teams have had.”

As a fan, Ruck enjoys college basketball the most.

“If you’re not going to be on the team, the next best thing is to be close to the people that are.” He also said that he enjoys being able to teach some of the athletes on the team.

For all the rich history that baseball has to offer, Ruck recognizes serious problems with the modern game. Greed, strikes and steroids have all eroded the appeal of baseball in the United States.

“What we’re seeing is an epidemic of steroid abuse and other issues. Many of [the players] are still trying to deny it, still trying to say they did nothing wrong, and that just doesn’t cut it.”

He said that the gap between the players and the fans is a detriment to the game. He said many players are “living in a bubble” or are just “caricatures of themselves.”

But ultimately, sports serve as a way to unite like few other aspects of society can. The competition and the common goal brings people from different backgrounds together.

“One of the great things about sport, I mean you don’t want to just beat up on cupcakes, you want to play people who are good, great, who are better than you, then you can prove yourself. You gain a certain respect in the process,” he said.