Ilvermorny School Of Witchcraft And Wizardry

Baseball At Ilvermorny

"It is played everywhere. In parks and playgrounds and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers' fields. By small children and by old men. By raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game where the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.
Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years, while they conquered a continent, warred with one another and with enemies abroad, and struggled over labor and civil rights and the meaning of freedom. At the games' heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that sometimes manages to be years ahead of its time.
It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers. And it reflects a host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners, scandal and reform, and the individual and the collective. It is a haunted game, where each player is measured by the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home." - Ken Burns Baseball

At Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, baseball is a cherished and widespread pastime, steeped in magical history. Notably, Ilvermorny was the first wizarding institution to adopt a No-Maj sports program. Each of the school's four houses boasts its baseball team, and their respective seasons run from March through June at Steward Park in Steward Square. The two top teams then compete in the highly anticipated Ilvermorny World Series, held in and around Cape Cod. Interestingly, the World Series was previously held at Fenway Park, home of the No-Maj team, the Boston Red Sox, from 1915 to 1934. All games are open to the public, making for an inclusive and exciting experience.

In the summer of 1839, a game of town ball was being played by the local academy and Green's Select School in Cooperstown, New York, near Lake Otsego. The rules of town ball were quite loose, allowing every hit to be fair and boys to run headlong into one another. During that game, Abner Doubleday, a player from the academy who was believed to have magical ancestry and some magical power, sat down and created a new set of rules for the game, which he called "baseball." According to legend, Doubleday would become a hero during The Battle of Gettysburg, and his game would eventually become The National Pastime. However, while Doubleday was a distinguished soldier at West Point, he was not present in Cooperstown that summer, and never claimed to have seen or had anything to do with baseball. The real history of baseball is much more complicated than this legend. But that is a story for another time.