First published in the USA in the 1960s, the Peanuts comic strip introduced readers to its main characters: a smart but depressed boy named Charlie Brown and a dreamy, mischievous dog called Snoopy. In France, young readers discovered the strip in the French newspaper Spirou.
Young French readers were also introduced to baseball and American football. Indeed, Charlie Brown’s many adventures often featured baseball prominently. The creator, Charles M. Schulz, was a true workhorse of the comic strip world. For 40 years without fail, he drew the speech bubbles and images of his heroes. The success was immense and global.
The author, Schulz, nicknamed Sparky, was a visionary, and his scripts tackled important societal issues. His baseball team was made up of both girls and boys, including a Black boy. While this might seem natural today, in the segregated and macho America of the 1960s to 1980s, it was a truly progressive stance.
About the baseball.
The question of who plays which position on Charlie Brown’s baseball team is fascinating, if only because the information has changed over the years.
At the beginning of the comic strip, the characters didn’t really have « fixed » positions; it wasn’t unusual to find Charlie Brown in the outfield or as the catcher (with Shermy as the pitcher). The children were never seen playing against other teams. They simply split up and played a game among themselves.
This situation changed in the early 1960s when a more or less official lineup was established. Some characters settled firmly into specific positions, like Charlie Brown, who always played as the pitcher. Linus pitched several times (usually winning the game), and even Lucy tried it… once. When Peppermint Patty visited the neighborhood for the first time and tried to « help » Chuck’s team, she pitched and sent him to left field. Other rare changes found Linus in the outfield (before his established position at second base), and Lucy at shortstop.
The occasional Sunday strips were conducive to « overall plans » of the entire team, although they were generally grouped around the pitcher’s mound. Here is the list of players on the team who occupy several positions across different comic strips:
Charlie Brown
Linus
Schroeder
Lucy
Shermy
Snoopy
Violette
Patty
Frieda
Perhaps more importantly than who plays which position, Charles Schulz used baseball as one of the enduring links of his comic strip to a gentler era, when small American towns would gather in large numbers every summer to watch parents and children try to « hit a ball in the park. »
Snoopy remains one of the most sold and popular comic strips in the world; it appears « daily in more than 2,500 newspapers, reaching over 350 million readers in 75 countries, » in 21 languages. Charles Schulz is the third deceased personality to generate the most revenue in the world.
