172 Days to Opening Day

Last off-season, Rattler Radio counted down the days to Opening Day 2007 with various baseball related numbers: 44 days to Opening Day 2007 equaled Hank Aaron; 4 days to Opening Day 2007 equaled Lou Gehrig; etc.

This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is of What If? edited by Robert Cowley.

What If? is an anthology of essays by military historians. They take something that happened in history, change a result, and follow that out to a different conclusion. For example, Stephen Ambrose has a brief entry about what the consequences of an unsuccessful D-Day in 1944 would have been. Eisenhower resigns, Churchill out of power, Dewey defeats Roosevelt in the November election, and the Soviet Union victorious over Germany and in control of all Europe.

The excerpt on page 172 is from Thomas Fleming’s essay Unlikely Victory: Thirteen Ways the Americans Could have Lost the Revolution. This one was What if Captain Ferguson had pulled the trigger?

Washington was reconnoitering the countryside, trying to decide where to position his army to stop Howe’s advance from the head of the Chesapeake. As he rode through a patch of woods near Brandywine Creek, he encountered Captain Patrick Ferguson of the British Army.

Ferguson was the inventor of the first breech-loading rifle, and he had one of those deadly weapons in his hands. It could spew out six bullets a minute and was far more accurate than the musket that was the standard gun in both armies. With no idea he had come face to face with Washington, Ferguson called on the horseman and his escort, a brightly uniformed hussar officer, to surrender. The officer shouted a warning and Washington wheeled his horse and galloped away. Ferguson took aim, then lowered his gun. He could not bring himself to shoot an unarmed enemy in the back. He was also more than a little impressed by the man’s cool indifference to sudden death.

If Washington had been killed in the fall of 1777, the American war effort would have been more than a little demoralized. By now it was becoming apparent to many people that the tall Virginian was the linchpin of the struggle, the man who combined an ability to inspire loyalty in the Continental Army with a steadfast commitment to the ideals of the Revolution. On the eve of Trenton, Congress had given Washington dictatorial powers to deal with the situation – and he had humbly returned this Cromwellian authority to the politicians six months later. The probability of finding another Washington was more than remote – it was almost certainly impossible.

Draw your own baseball analogies to any of these entries during the off-season.