Everything you ever wanted to know about Finnish baseball

Pesäpallo, or Finnish baseball, is the Finnish national sport, with a history full of colorful characters, grand emotions, and scandals. In the future, there may even be tea breaks.

Written by Matti Mäkelä translated by OWen F. WitesMan

Based on rock paintings, ancient mammoth hunters were already playing a game like baseball in Finland at the end of the ice age. That would be a nice way to start the story of pesäpallo, but in reality, the history of the sport is much shorter and much less connected to any mythical roots in Finnishness.

The father of the sport was Lauri Pihkala, the Grand Old Man of Finnish sports, who developed the rules of pesäpallo in the 1910s, modeled on American baseball and a game called kuningaspallo (“kingball”) played earlier in Finland. And kuningaspallo wasn’t born in a vacuum either—in the background there were many other ball games where the goal was to hit a ball, run, catch, and tag out opponents. The closest equivalents of kuningaspallo were the Swedish långboll, the German Schlagball and the Russian laptá.

Strictly speaking, pesäpallo is a case of cultural appropriation of pan-European and American traditions. The name of the sport is even a direct translation from the American pastime. Despite their

A similar level of baseball enthusiasm in New York City would mean that Yankee Stadium would need to have 15 million seats.

similarities, there are also many differences between baseball and pesäpallo, the biggest of which is that in pesäpallo, the ball is pitched upwards, not towards the batsman as in baseball and cricket. This difference is apparently due to the fact that Pihkala, who found baseball boring (Homer Simpson also made this observation while trying to watch his favorite sport during his beer strike) wanted more action in the game. Charlie Brown might also enjoy the pitching style in pesäpallo, since he would never have to worry about another line drive.

The firSt officiAl gAme of pesäpallo in its current form was played in Helsinki on November 14, 1920. Thanks to the lobbying work of Pihkala and other activists, the game spread rapidly and became known as the national sport of the young nation. In the 1920s and 1930s, the game was particularly popular in schools and civil guard units (a voluntary national defense organization active from 1918 to 1944).

Finland, which had just become independent, was a country divided by the wounds of the Civil War of 1918, and the reputation of pesäpallo as a sport from “white” (vs “red”) Finland prevented the wider adoption of the sport by the working-class sports movement until after the Second World War. Similarly, Swedish-speaking Finns initially shunned the sport as too connected to Fennoman ideology.

Pihkala’s own background and worldview also influenced the reputation of pesäpallo. Pihkala was ardently nationalistic and belonged to the White Army during the Civil War. Later it was alleged that he was involved in activities during the war that would now likely be considered war crimes. After the war, Pihkala served as the sports director of the civil guards and promoted the sport as a form of training especially suitable for soldiers. According to Pihkala, the sport was not suitable for women, for whom he recommended tennis, swimming and figure skating.

Since the Second World WAr, the position of pesäpallo has stabilized, and practically every Finn has played the sport at least during school physical education classes (however, due to the difficulty of the sport, that hasn’t always been a good thing, as can be seen from many recollections of childhood trauma related on the Internet).

Pesäpallo continues to divide the country but for geographical rather than ideological reasons. After ice hockey and football, pesäpallo is the third most watched team sport in Finland, but its popularity is concentrated in the countryside and small towns. But in the sport’s core areas, its popularity is incredibly huge. For example, the average number of spectators for the team in the town of Vimpeli is more than 2,000, with a spectator record of 5,216. These numbers won’t seem high unless you know that the population of Vimpeli is only 2,756. A similar level of baseball enthusiasm in New York City would mean that Yankee Stadium would need to have 15 million seats.

However, in the 1990s, the situation seemed to be changing. The all-time crowd record for the top pesäpallo series was made in 1997, when the total number of spectators hit almost half a million. Helsinki had got its own major league team a year earlier, sponsors had taken notice, and pesäpallo seemed like it might become a serious challenger to hockey and football.

But two years later, everything was different. The Helsinki-based club Kaisaniemi Tigers had been successful athletically, but financially the club’s two-year story was a disaster that ended in bankruptcy at the end of the 1998 season. In the same year, the reputation of pesäpallo was also tarnished by a match-fixing scandal involving a large number of players as well as management and other staff from different teams. Police eventually investigated 460 people, of whom 30 were convicted. The scandal lingered in the headlines, damaging the reputation of the sport and reducing its popularity.

Over the lASt decAde, the popularity of pesäpallo has risen again and small indications of urbanization have even been seen again: the Pesäpallo World Cup was held in 2017 in Turku, and the Tampere club Manse PP took the Finnish championship in 2021. Internationally, pesäpallo is an extremely small sport, although it has spread to Sweden and Australia with the help of Finnish immigrants. The World Cup began in 1992, with Finland, as expected, taking all the gold medals awarded. Second in the medal stats is Australia, where the World Cup has been played twice. The 2019 tournament was held in India, and for the first time, the traditional cricket countries of India and Bangladesh took top rankings. Interestingly, pesäpallo has not spread to these countries with migrants but through social media. So what is the future of pesäpallo? Of course, there are big challenges for the sport. Competition for the interest of participants and spectators is intensifying all the time with new sports and forms of leisure. On the other hand, pesäpallo has a strong and committed fan base, and in a positive future scenario, the sport could first become the number one sport in Finland’s major cities and then maybe even an international success story. That would probably require rethinking the rules and practices of the sport; for example, acceptance could be promoted in cricket countries by adding tea breaks as part of the culture of the game. s