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      If all planning goes well, a group of partners will bring “barnstorming” baseball to communities along and near historic U.S. Route 66 next year.
“Hey, baseball? That’s great,” I hear you exclaim. “But what’s with this ‘barnstorming’ business?”
      Well, folks, barnstorming in baseball dates back more than a century, to the early 1900s. To “barnstorm” in baseball involves a traveling team playing exhibition games in small towns and cities. Historically, those were communities that either did not have their own baseball teams or perhaps had only a local youth team or town team.
      Those traveling teams – usually professional or semipro, and usually not affiliated with any organized league – would travel around playing local teams of one sort or another. Frequently, they would rent local baseball fields, sell tickets and, in effect, bring a certain level of baseball to the boonies, the burgs and the boomtowns across the nation.
      But why call it “barnstorming,” I hear you mutter. Well, that reference goes back even farther in history – back, in fact, to the 1880s. And it comes from the world of performance, when touring troupes of actors put on plays and perhaps other types of shows. They would use whatever space they could find – and often, that would be barns in the rural areas involved. Thus: barnstorming.
Then in the early 1900s, the term apparently was first applied to traveling baseball aggregations, obviously similar in nature to traveling acting troupes.
After World War I, with the advent of airplanes, pilots would look for ways to make some money by taking people on flights. Frequently, they would park their planes in barns in the rural areas of America, and those barns would open to fields suitable for takeoffs and landings. Again, it was called “barnstorming.”
      But back to baseball. Through most of the first six decades of the 20th century, barnstorming in baseball involved Major League Baseball teams and those in the Negro Leagues. In fact, as early as 1860, a major-league team called the Brooklyn Excelsiors did suck tours, though the “barnstorming” term was yet to be applied.
      But Major League Baseball teams doing such thing? You betcha. Up until 1947, the big-league players were paid only during the season – and even then, they didn’t make much, certainly not the current pay levels (which – yes, average – in the millions per player). So they looked for ways to supplement their pay, and they played exhibitions in the off-season, usually in non-major-league cities. Even as late as 1962, a player as famous as Willie Mays tried such a tour, though unsuccessfully.
      And even later than that, as recently as 1992, the New England Grey Sox, with well-known players like Ferguson Jenkins and Tug McGraw, tried the barnstorming approach. Even more recently? Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd, another old major-leaguer, tried a barnstorming team of black players just two years ago (2007), hoping to further the cause of reviving baseball in the inner cities.
But back to those first decades of the 1900s. That was the age of segregation in the U.S. of course. Blacks in the pre-Jackie Robinson days were barred from organized baseball, so they formed their own leagues – and they formed touring teams, taking their game to Small Town USA, often throughout the Midwest and the Plains States.
      Traveling by auto and bus, living out of suitcases (generally barred from staying in small-town hostelries), they usually played against teams of white folks, sometimes against touring major-leaguers. One noted example was the Indianapolis Clowns.
There were other features in the history of barnstorming baseball. A few of them:
      • A group of major-league players barnstormed in Japan in 1934.
      • Perhaps inspired by seeing the pros playing, any number of local sandlot and town teams, both white and black, tried the barnstorming approach. Frequently, they faded out of the scene quickly.
      • Then there were the House of David traveling teams, with the name stemming from the early 20th century religious organization dedicated to rebuilding religious ties, but mostly didn’t. The players all wore long beards, some real, some reportedly not. At times they were called the “Bearded Wonders.” Many of the players had been thrown out of organized baseball.
      • A longtime friend of this writer’s recalls being the official scorer for a game in Tacoma, Washington, in the mid-1950s, involving a traveling team featuring Satchel Paige. This friend also was familiar with House of David teams. [For that matter my friend has been the official scorer at baseball games at virtually all levels for more than 50 years – and still is. But that’s another story entirely.]
      • In the early 20th century, there were even some women’s barnstorming baseball teams, often with team names like the Peaches, the Belles and, yes, the Bloomer Girls.
      In short, barnstorming at various levels – pro, semipro, amateur – has been a noteworthy part of the history of baseball in the U.S. Especially before the advent of television, such as touring teams gave millions of citizens the chance to see professionals and semipros play the game. And it gave local teams – business-sponsored, amateur, semipro – a chance to play a different opponent than usual, and perhaps one of higher skills.
      And that, if all goes well, is what is coming your way in 2010 – a barnstorming team of Route 66 All-Stars, playing independent-league teams and local town teams, in exhibitions all along that famous route. Watch for it; don’t miss it. You’ll have a ball, in more ways than one.

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About the author
     Ted Tow has been a baseball fan since stumbling across an old St. Louis Browns scorecard in a World War II paper drive piled high in the family garage when he was 8 years old. Surviving to adulthood, he has taught journalism at the high-school, community college and university levels; owned a weekly newspaper for a brief and expensive period; owned and operated a public-relations firm; and worked for 22 years a top staff executive of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). A native of Nebraska, he lives in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. And, yes, he is looking for work.

“BARNSTORMING” BASEBALL WHEN? PERHAPS IN 2010