The Irish Impact on Baseball

Dr. Casway will examine the role and impact of post-famine Irish American boys on the development of our National Pastime. The bat/ball background of Irish youths and their desire to achieve the American dream through sports will be evaluated. For them, the game was a vehicle of assimilation and expression of their new identity. More importantly, the Irish instilled baseball with a competitive spirit that mirrored the Irish struggle for survival in their new homeland. In this “Emerald Age” of baseball, 30 to 65% of all major league players were of Irish origin. The role and contributions of Charlie Comiskey, Connie Mack, John McGraw, Ned Hanlon and their teams will be examined. The impact of ballplayers such as Mike Kelly, Willie Keeler, Ed Delahanty, and their contrasting Irish styles of play, will be presented. Quoting from Professor Casway’s book, Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball, “Baseball was also a microcosm of Irish endurance, an alluring prize for skilled young men who shaped the game to their overbearing drive to succeed.”  The Delahanty biography will be available for purchase after the talk.

THE EMERALD AGE OF BASEBALL

Dr. Jerrold Casway is a Professor of History and the Chairman of the Social Sciences/Teacher Education Division at Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland. He actively researches and writes about Irish History and culture. His major interests are early modern Irish history and the sporting culture of nineteenth-century Irish America. The author of two acclaimed books, Owen Roe O’Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland,  Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball and a pamphlet biography of Rosa O’Dogarty, Casway has published widely on seventeenth-century Irish women and black-Irish relations in post-bellum America. A sought-after reviewer, Professor Casway has written over fifty articles and presented papers on both sides of the Atlantic. Currently, he is working on the struggle for survival of the post-flight continental refugees and is examining the ethnicity and culture of nineteenth-century baseball, particularly Irish American ballplayers. This spring, Casway was recognized by the Irish America Magazine as one of the top 100 contributors to Irish Studies.