Charlie Brown's All Stars!

With everything being held in suspense this year while the world makes up its mind what it’s going to do with the pandemic (simply because waiting for a vaccine will take far too long to simply stay home and wait), baseball season is supposed to start over the 4th of July weekend, sans fans, in empty stadia, with only television cameras looking on. Exactly how it is going to be pulled off remains to be seen. But, as many observers insist, America’s Pastime can help Americans pass the time this summer, distracting them from the weary months of worry and boredom that have gone by and that are to come.

If you were to ask people to name the very first Peanuts TV special to air, most of them would correctly answer A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was first broadcast in December 1965. But if asked to name the second Peanuts special, most of them would wrongly identify it as It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which first aired in October 1966. Both of these specials have become perennial favorites with American viewers, and have been aired continually since their premiers.

The second Charlie Brown special, which first aired 54 years ago today on June 8, 1966, was Charlie Brown’s All Stars! in which Charlie Brown is the manager of a neighborhood baseball team consisting of five boys, three girls and a dog who can’t throw (Snoopy). As the new baseball season begins, the players show up hoping that Charlie Brown doesn’t, blaming all of their defeats to every opposing team on him. But, as we are shown, the team’s misfortunes aren’t entirely the manager’s fault. They lose their first game 123 to 0 and all of the players threaten to quit the team. Charlie Brown, always wanting to be the hero and not the “goat,” has to find some way of getting the players to come and play. Linus tells Charlie Brown that the owner of the town hardware store, Mr. Hennessy, wants to provide his team with uniforms and get them into a baseball league. Charlie Brown tells his players the news and they agree to play in the next scheduled game.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hennessy phones Charlie Brown and tells him the league won’t accept a team with girls and a dog on it. Charlie Brown knows that his team will quit if he tells them the news, so he waits until after the game to tell them. They lose the game 2 to 1, because Charlie Brown tried to steal home and failed, and, lying on his back, he breaks the news to them: no uniforms and no league. Just as he predicted, everyone quits. Charlie Brown is the goat.

But Linus, always the conciliator, tells his teammates the real reason they didn’t get the uniforms and, together, they decide to make a uniform for Charlie Brown as a gesture of contrition. The trouble is – the only material available is Linus’s blue blanket. They even use Linus to fit the finished product, which has the words “Our Manager” on the front. When they present it to Charlie Brown he is touched, but then he quickly tells them to show up for tomorrow’s game. Luckily, for everyone – and especially Charlie Brown – the game is rained out.(1)

Peanuts is a peculiarly – gloriously – American creation. To understand why, all you need do is try to imagine what Charlie Brown’s All Stars would be like if the children were playing cricket. In his early novel Psmith in the City, P. G. Wodehouse devotes a chapter to a cricket match. Reading it, I hadn’t the vaguest notion of what was happening from one paragraph to the next. Wodehouse was engaging in, to an American reader, the arcane jargon of a beloved national sport that was untranslatable. All the chapter communicated to me was Wodehouse’s love of cricket, and that was all I needed to know.

Charles Schulz does the same for baseball in Charlie Brown’s All Stars, just as he would do for trick-or-treating the following October in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. He was relating to us his intense love of baseball and, metaphorically, of America. 

In his beautiful writings on sports, and baseball especially, the Anglo-American novelist Wilfrid Sheed gave us flashing glimpses into his heart – where baseball is a ritualized, venerated religion:

The good and the bad of sports are exquisitely balanced even at the best of times. Victory and defeat induce respectively a joy and despair way beyond the run of normal human experience. When a politician says he hates something viscerally – whether it's John Major on terrorism or Senator Windbag on flag-burning – one doubts his insides are much disturbed: as Dr. Johnson might say, he will eat his dinner tonight.

But a sports fan who has seen a sure victory slip away in the bottom of the ninth, or the work of a whole season obliterated by a referee's call in overtime, is disconsolate beyond the power of description, although Sophocles comes close. This author experienced such grief over the defeat of the Dodgers by the Cardinals in 1942 as an 11-year-old should not be asked to bear. An adult inflicting such pain on a child would be thrown in jail.

Yet I got over it, and was all the better for it, recovering sufficiently to root for the Cardinals over the hated Yankees in the World Series. This cycle of make-believe deaths and rebirths can actually be the healthiest thing about sports, or the most dangerous, depending on how you handle it. At its worst, it can cause riots and death, but at its best the pain of defeat is cleansing and instructive, a very good rehearsal for life.(2)

Schulz’s genius as a cartoonist was his ability to humorously dramatize the tiniest events of childhood and make us feel their impact on a child. But in the midst of their innocence, his children often reflect philosophically on their lives, contributing, of course, to the comic strip’s humor. The last we see of Charlie Brown is him standing on the pitcher’s mound in the driving rain while Linus holds the tails of his manager uniform to his face because it was made from his old blue blanket.

I miss baseball.


(1) Vince Guaraldi, whose music graced the Peanuts specials from the '60s into the' 70s, supplied Charlie Brown's All Stars with the beautiful song, "Rain, Rain, Go Away."
(2)  Wilfrid Sheed, "Why Sports Matter."