According to poet Walt Whitman, “base ball,” as originally spelled, is “America’s game,” which “has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere.”  But baseball, when played on Sunday afternoons, occasionally collided with another American institution: Blue Laws—local or state laws that compelled businesses to close on Sundays. 

Sunday baseball likewise evoked a conflict between “Puritan Sunday,” which mandated Sunday as a day of rest defined in spiritual terms, and “Continental Sunday,” a more recent trend brought to America by European immigrants who worked six days a week and therefore saw Sunday as a day, or at least an afternoon, of secular recreation. This conflict played out in Walla Walla in 1901 and 1902, when an outbreak of puritanism threatened baseball, punished saloonkeepers, and raised questions of religious liberty, ultimately reaching the state Supreme Court for final settlement. The crisis pitted team manager and attorney John L. Sharpstein, Main Street saloonkeepers, and College Place general-store owner Dorsey Nichols on one side, and the Walla Walla (Protestant) Ministerial Union and the local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union on the other.

County prosecutor Oscar Cain, himself a baseball fan, announced that he would begin to enforce the Sunday closing laws in July. The result, wrote the Walla Walla Union (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) on July 16, had a dire impact on local residents: “Ice cream parlors were closed, the soda fountain was stilled, the smoker looked longingly through the closed doors of the cigar stand or stood with his hands deep in his trouser pockets and chewed the stem of his empty cob pipe, for it was Sunday and even the most hardened sinner was aware of it.”

But perhaps the most shocking fear, again in the Union: “Can Sunday baseball be prevented under the law?”  Stay tuned!

Terrell (Terry) D. Gottschall earned a Ph.D. in recent German history from Washington State University in 1981. He taught European history, and the occasional baseball course, for forty-one years before retiring from the Department of History and Philosophy, Walla Walla University, in September 2019. He and his wife Merry reside in Walla Walla, where they entertain their four grandchildren all too rarely!

This presentation reflects an earlier work: “A Puritan Sunday:  Base Ball and Blue Laws in Walla Walla, Washington, 1901-1902,” in Base Ball:  A Journal of the Early Game, 7 (Spring 2013): 154-169.