The Gilded Age Cast Break Down Season 3’s Baseball Game 

This article contains spoilers for The Gilded Age season 3 episode 5.

The Gilded Age season 3 has seen many characters experience some romantic ups and downs. Aurora Fane (Kelli O’Hara) finds out her husband is dumping her for his mistress. Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) is married off to the Duke (Ben Lamb) after only meeting him a few times. Her parents, Bertha (Carrie Coon) and George (Morgan Spector), have been at odds for months now over the arrangement. 

However, it’s not all romantic doom and gloom on The Gilded Age, there’s also love and baseball! Peggy (Denée Benton) is courting the man who saved her from a serious illness, Dr. William Kirkland (Jordan Donica). The couple is in the getting-to-know-you stage, and in episode 5, Peggy and William go on a date to a baseball game in Brooklyn. While there, they run into Peggy’s old flame T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones).   

HBO invited Den of Geek, along with other Black journalists, to observe a day on The Gilded Age set in September 2024. Long Island’s Old Bethpage Village’s open fields were transformed into what a typical pre-Major League baseball game would look like. We also interviewed actors Denée Benton, Jordan Donica, and Sullivan Jones, co-executive producer and historical advisor Dr. Erica Dunbar, and screenwriter and executive producer Sonja Warfield to find out more about the making of the scene and how it fits into the wider context of The Gilded Age Season 3. 

While The Gilded Age has tackled the traumatic aspects of the Black experience in this era, the goal of this sequence is to recreate a hidden slice of communal joy. According to Dr. Dunbar and Black baseball historian James E. Brunson III, 1884 was well before the Negro Leagues were established, which changed the direction of the script, set design, and costumes. 

“The Black baseball scene is important because it’s a reminder that the story of Black baseball did not begin with Jackie Robinson,” Dr. Dunbar says. “There were Black baseball teams in the 19th century, in this moment leading up to the professionalization of baseball as a sport. Black men are playing against one another, and it is a part of recreational culture across New York and the nation. As a historian, it’s wonderful to feature these little tidbits, little jewels that we get to drop to remind our viewers that yes, this existed. Yes, this happened.”

The story of Black baseball stretches even further back than 1884. It’s documented in New York, where Madison Square Garden is currently located, that two black baseball teams played there as early as 1848. If we take a step back, they had teams of enslaved players in the 1830s who played baseball for their owners.

 “Dr. Erica Dunbar told us the players were regular working men. When I found that out, I wanted to demonstrate that, so that’s why William has that line where he says, ‘That’s my accountant,” says Sonja Warfield, who co-wrote season 3 episode 5 alongside The Gilded Age and Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.

Setup for the day began at 6 a.m, and filming continued until sunset. Seeing so many Black actors of all ages dressed in their Victorian finest was the most uplifting and exciting part of the set visit. “It’s pretty special when you see all of us dressed like this, it feels different,” Jones says. “There’s a sense of dignity and pride. Of course there’s the respectability part, the Bill Cosby ‘pull your pants up thing,’ which I think it’s important to remember that just because people dress like this doesn’t mean anything about who they are as people. Even though that progress was taken away several years later, we had it and we can have it today.”

“Dating in the 1880s was very different than what it’s like now,” Warfield adds. “If you were an unmarried couple of a certain class, you had to be out in public all the time. A baseball game is something that the Black middle class would attend, and it would make sense that Fortune would be there too,” Warfield said. 

How accessible and affordable was a baseball game ticket in 1884? “The price range is anywhere from 10 cents for children to about 25 cents for an adult,” Brunson says. That 25-cent adult ticket is equivalent to $8.25 in today’s dollars. Sitting in the shade would cost more than sitting in the sun. Working and middle-class Black people in 1884 could enjoy a day at a game without breaking the bank.” Money for team uniforms, renting fields, and other expenses came from subscriptions and gambling bets. 

The baseball game date is presented as William’s idea. “It’s an opportunity, just like with any date, for us to get to know each other, for her to see my interests, to share my interests with her, to introduce her to a side of the Black community that she has never seen in terms of going to these baseball games,” Donica says. “It’s also a little bit of a flex because William is a part owner in the team. There’s a lot at play.”

This baseball game also represents a break from the struggles of racism in 1884. “​Honestly, I’m always astounded, even now, at Black people’s access to play and creation, even in the most oppressive fascist regimes,” Denée Benton says. “It feels special to tap into, we’re so physically uncomfortable, they’re literally living under discomfort, and yet there’s play. Yet they’re inventing a game, yet they’re creating life, and we get to learn from those survival skills.”

After Dunbar and Brunson explained the history behind the scenes, the camera crew set up to film the baseball players from the front, sides, and rear. They filmed each part of the actions of sliding into base and throwing the ball multiple times from different angles. Several of the takes also involved filming the extras playing patrons and food vendors from different angles. 

Many of these repeat takes had the camera focused on Peggy and William’s conversation while the players made their moves in the background. Several of the shots were only the dialogue from Benton and Donica for ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement). The wind, the players scraping to slide into base, plus the extras clapping and cheering, could make it hard to hear the actors. These alternate dialogue takes would be used in the post-production sound mixing. 

Peggy and William’s lines move between commenting on the plays and flirtation.“It’s the first time we get to see them have entertainment together, and then obviously for Peggy, she has this moment where she’s falling for someone and then runs into her old flame,” Benton says. “You get to see how that reaction happens in her body. An old love popping up when you have a new love always creates a different kind of friction, of you having to look clearly at what you have now.” 

Fortune offers Peggy the chance to interview the Black suffragette activist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Philadelphia. “He’s going to bring her back to the fold because her talent is more important than his emotions,” Sullivan Jones says. “This represents a moment pre-Black Codes, pre-Jim Crow, where Black people were involved with everything. We were becoming lawyers, we were scientists, we were doctors.”

“You never know, the universe has a funny way of doing that to people in real life,” Donica adds. “William meets T. Thomas Fortune, who is big in the Black community, whose paper he’s subscribed to and supports. He’s also picking up on a little ‘something something’ between Fortune and Peggy, but William is confident enough and secure enough in himself to be okay with anything that Peggy has been through.” Donica says.

The first five episodes of Season 3 of The Gilded Age are currently streaming on HBO Max, and new episodes are released on cable and streaming Sunday nights at 9 PM EST.