Jeffrey Scholes,
University of Denver/Iliff School
of Theology
Abstract
Over the last ten years, Major League Baseball has suffered a significant
loss of fan support. The reasons for this are varied and numerous,
but an explanatory theory to unite them is largely lacking. This
is particularly evident within the field of religious scholarship
where baseball, if spoken of at all, is romanticized and rarely
analyzed for the problems it faces. Or because of the secular
trappings of professional sport and its willingness to adopt the
rationalized means of organizing and expressing itself, some scholars
argue that religion is largely absent there. Conversely in
this paper, I show how baseball has in the past and continues to
provide a kind of religious ritual experience for the fan via its
use of a life-cycle. Then I will argue that the way in which
business and baseball interact today results in a dis-integration
of said coherent experience that prohibits many fans from engaging
with their sport.
Sure, baseball is a business. But in the relationship between
fans and baseball, as in other love affairs, realism need not
mean the end of romance.
- George
Will(1)
Introduction
[1] Sportscaster Bob Costas begins his book, Fair Ball, with
a story of a typical Minnesota Twins fan watching game four of the
1999 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves. Normally,
such a game provokes excitement in our fan not only by way of the
weightiness of any World Series game but also because it serves
as a reminder that his Twins could be playing one of the teams in
October next year. Yet sitting here in 1999, he experiences
an emotional state that more closely resembles resentment, disengagement
and disillusionment at the spectacle before him. For the Yankees
and Braves have spent vast more amounts of money on players than
the Twins’ owner. Therefore, as a consequence of living
in a small market that cannot generate the cash of the big market,
the Twins fan watches two teams that seem “to be playing in
a league, if not a sport, entirely different from (his) own.”(2) Moreover,
any hope that the Twins will play in next year’s World Series
evaporates in the face of mounting opposition bought with massive
bankrolls.
[2] Baseball is not supposed to engender such hopelessness. On
the contrary, the hope and promise accompanying the season’s
beginning in spring have sufficed to carry many fans through the
winter after suffering loss and the symbolic death of their teams
in the fall. Joseph Price corroborates this when he suggests
that “sports seasons cultivate the growth of hope (as with
the eternal, recurrent optimism of Cubs’ fans) and the ability
to deal with thwarted possibilities and frustrated expectations
by recognizing the prospect for a new season in a new year.”(3) Because
hope, resistance, failure, and redemption are operative in the cycle
of baseball seasons, it should come as no surprise that baseball
has fueled the religious imagination of fiction writers and scholars
alike.
[3] Unfortunately, the spate of religious academic literature on
baseball merely expands on a kind of descriptive, borderline romantic
analysis that leaves the reader with the impression that baseball
is a kind of religion and that its trajectory always points towards
salvation. Left behind in books such as From Season to
Season and The Faith of 50 Million(4) are
the experiences of the ever-increasing number of troubled fans for
whom baseball’s ethereal qualities lack a material medium
through which they can be expressed.
[4] A countervailing analysis of modern sport, offered most prominently
by Allen Guttmann in his From Ritual to Record(5) and A
Whole New Ball Game,(6) effectively
demonstrates that cosmic religious significance of sports has been
replaced by secular meaning in the form of statistics and records. Rationalization
of institutions occurring in industrialized countries has produced
a sports world that expresses itself symbolically through abstract
numbers to be interpreted by calculation. While Guttmann’s
work serves as a justifiable check on the impulse to consecrate
baseball as well as partially explains the detachment that modern
fans may feel from their sport, it does not address baseball’s
particular problem.
[5] I contend that proper analysis of the problem requires that
the analyst stand between those who want to conflate religion and
baseball and those who radically separate the two. In sympathy
with the first group, I will first argue that baseball can act as
a religious ritual, primarily through its transmission of a life-cycle,
to its fans. The use of ritual analysis that relies on Clifford
Geertz’s terminology and schema will allow not only for an
exposition of the religious, perhaps transcendent, content of baseball
but also of the practical, immanent part of the game. Thus
through the lens of a certain kind of ritual, an analysis will be
offered that at once honors the “sacredness” of baseball
and speaks to the “profane” way a fan enters into the
ritual. When these two facets integrate unsuccessfully, the
critical space created between the two invites a critique of one
or both facets—an opportunity that cannot materialize when
the exclusive focus is on the game’s sacred elements.
[6] Secondly, I will claim that Guttmann’s surface-level critique
of Marxist interpretations of sport permits him to gloss over the
extent that commercialization has affected modern sport. Guttmann
favors a Weberian rendering of sport that chronicles the growing
rationalization of sport. This move is made at the risk of
neglecting the underside, and perhaps result, of rationalization:
the utilization of sport for economic ends. Statistics can
still inspire fervent belief in baseball, but when suspicion arises
as to the impact of money on fair competition on the field, the “soul” of
baseball suffers terminally. It is by observing this slow
death that the religious scholar can extract a deeper religious
significance that inheres in baseball. In the end, I argue
that the “dis-integration” of its ritual expression
can be traced to the submerging of baseball’s integrity or
soul by the unchecked drive for profit exhibited by big market teams. Resultant
is a break in the experience of a life-cycle for many fans. And
lacking any fundamental means of generating hope each season, baseball
will continue to distance itself from its fans.
The Current State of Baseball
[7] Baseball has historically held a prominent position in the collective
imagination of many Americans. One reason for this hold is
the belief that baseball and America are practically one and the
same. At its inception, the game served as an extension of
the kind of factory specialization so prevalent in nineteenth century
America, despite its rogue economic structure,(7) and
reflected deeply felt American virtues such as freedom, justice
and equality.(8) Functionally,
baseball helped unify disparate realities by brokering a “pastoral
reconciliation” between urban life and bucolic sentimentality.(9) Its
gatekeepers were blind to social class (though not to race or gender)
thus representing a kind of democratic ideal with an individualistic
bent. As such, baseball became a beacon of the Progressive Era;
a symbol of American purity amidst rising concerns over corporate
power and corruption.(10)
[8] What has happened to our national pastime’s symbolic status
which, alongside hot dogs and apple pie, supposedly reflects Americana
itself? The ideals of democracy and individualism certainly
still hold sway even if nominally. The rules of the game have
not changed substantially in one hundred years. The players,
if anything, are more skilled than ever, at least with regard to
home run hitting—a perennial fan favourite. Spring,
summer and autumn still arrive like clockwork to provide the natural
backdrop the each season. If baseball were still primarily
operating off of these themes, it would seemingly remain on an iceberg-less
sea. Yet if, fans care not whether their sport destroys itself,
then baseball is no longer on the same body of water.
[9] Historian G. Edward White asks in his book, Creating the
National Pastime, “How was the centrality of baseball
to followers of sports in America somehow lost, so at this writing
(1996) baseball does not appear fundamentally different, in its
institutional practices, economic organization, labor relations,
and arguably in its cultural appeal, from other established professional
sports?”(11) Perhaps
in 1976 this question would have some merit, but it is a bit
perplexing when stated in 1996. There will be strong similarities
among professional sports in America by virtue of being defined
as a sport in the same time and space. However, despite
the necessary similarities, baseball distinguishes itself in
conspicuous ways. Major League Baseball uniquely has no
salary cap as a result of bending to the most powerful players’ union
among the other three major professional leagues. The lack
of a salary cap has had effects on baseball that the other sports
will never see. The primary one is the disparity among
the different teams’ payrolls.(12) The
baseball fan must now grapple with a situation where certain
owners who have access to large amounts of capital and possess
a willingness to spend it have won the vast majority of division
titles since the disparity became evident (beginning in 1995,
after the 1994 strike). Teams existing in a small market
and/or having owners who are simply unwilling to make an investment
that matches the top teams have, on the whole, finished near
the bottom.(13) The
upshot of this situation is that the baseball hierarchy depends
more and more on the tightness of the owner’s purse strings
than on the quality of play among teams beginning at the same
starting line.
[10] To gain an impression of the current fan/sport relationship,
look no further than the primary indicators: television ratings,
fan polls, local columnists’ comments, and attendance. A
historical survey of television ratings for the World Series reveals
that over half of the viewers who consistently watched up until
1980 have been on a steady decline since then, only garnering 25%
of the share each year since 1998.(14) In
2002, while a potential players’ strike threatened the remainder
of the season, the overwhelming fan reaction reflected a telling
state of mind. As disturbing as the possibility of no World
Series should be, perhaps more alarming was the lack of concern
displayed by fans as to the outcome of the negotiations. A New
York Times poll revealed that 72% of admitted baseball fans
were not following the strike developments closely.(15) It
is true that average attendance per game has not significantly decreased
over the last 10 years.(16) However,
as I will point out briefly, this statistic obscures the details
of what kinds of teams are consistently bringing the average
down and why.
[11] These are general trends. Specifically, it must be said
that fans of some teams are content—namely those of
teams that win consistently. Yet there have always been winners
and losers; there have been dynasties in the past as well which
tell us of consistent winners and losers. Therefore, the presence
of a persistent winner or perennial loser (see the Yankees or Red
Sox/Cubs respectively) does not necessarily translate into fan disillusionment. The
question is how and why teams become dominant and
teams fail each year. If this question is not asked, then
the issue of decreasing popularity cannot be settled sufficiently.
[12] Two qualifications must be made before proceeding. First,
regarding ‘consistent winners and losers,’ even in this
day and age there are small-market teams—the 2003 Florida
Marlins for instance—that make the playoffs and occasionally
win the World Series. This fact, though, does not damage the
larger argument that considerable financial disparity between teams
not only lifts up the rich teams on the field by and large, but
also that fans of such successful small-market teams must begrudgingly
accept that their good players will most likely leave for a higher
salary offered by a big-market team. A successful small-market
team like the Oakland As have largely been able to overcome their
meager cash pool with clever scouting techniques as documented in
the book, Moneyball.(17) However,
the As’ approach is unique;(18) they
have yet to make it out of the first round of the playoffs in their
recent run, and they prove that sound baseball decisions can still
go a long way—a point that will used later to link baseball decisions
to success in an ideal league.
[13] Second, my study will focus on the experience of fans of cellar-dwelling
teams. Even though one could argue that championships won with a
team that spends almost twice as much as any other team mean less
that those won at an earlier time, fans of the consistent winners
may not feel any palpable displeasure with baseball per se.(19) These
fans still have justifiable hope each season, and the teams’ attendance
figures reflect the appeal of winning.(20) However,
fans of losing teams who do not have the luxury of a distraction
from the problems with baseball can locate disappointment over their
team in a larger context of disappointment with the entire sport.(21) Losing
breeds antipathy for the team and results in lower attendance. Losing
consistently because your team cannot compete with big-market teams
for good players breeds antipathy for the league for permitting
this disparity. Therefore, the experience of such fans offers
more insight into the general decline of the sport as well as furnishes
the analyst with a well-delineated starting point from which to
explore some of the reasons for such an experience.
Guttmann and the Price of Over-Rationalization
[14] Allen Guttmann, writing in 1978 before substantial financial
disparity in the league, still recognized a “relative decline
in baseball” occurring at that time.(22) His
explanation involves baseball’s complex negotiation between
a pre-modern or pastoral element of the game and a modern means
of rationalizing every aspect of play on the field. While
the move towards strict management of statistics and salaries by
the team and fans alike parallels societal trends, the pastoral
element so relied upon in baseball’s early history is diminishing. Therefore,
baseball is no longer able to act as an effective medium between
the pastures to the mechanized city, cyclical to linear time. For
Guttmann, it is this dissonance that may explain declining interest
in baseball--not necessarily the increased emphasis on quantification
alone.(23) I agree. A
dependence on quantification of player and team statistics in no
way detracts from baseball’s popularity. One look at
the swell in fan interest during the 1998 season in which two players
were pursuing the long-standing single season homerun record will
confirm this. Yet, seasons such as this are anomalies in part
because grand statistical feats endure abstractly. And when
the sport is unhitched from its concrete, pastoral moorings, baseball
on the whole loses its capacity to ground such accomplishments.
[15] If, however, baseball’s more recent decline can be accounted
for by the kind of “pastoral/urban” dissonance that
Guttmann describes, then how does the big market/small market team
discrepancy fit into this account? One way to involve Guttmann
in this current problem would be to interpret the influence of rich
owners on the game as one more indicator of increased rationalization
of baseball. Perhaps distance between the organic and manufactured
elements of baseball permits the Steinbrenners of the Major Leagues
to radically modify their teams with tools (money) that have little
to do with the internal workings of the game.(24)
[16] This application of Guttmann’s work would be a stretch,
however. First, Guttmann refuses to include escalating commercialization
of sport in his collection of traits that typify modern sport.(25) When
he does mention commercialization or more specifically the use of
players and teams for commercial purposes, he subordinates its influence
to that of the effects of quantification: “Most of the
diseases of modern sports, however, have infected all modern societies
and cannot be associated simply with commercialization: an overemphasis
on winning, cheating, the use of drugs, the training of small children
for highly competitive sports, and the tendency to turn every form
of play into some kind of contest.”(26) These
are, no doubt, diseases and are related to the desire to win and
obtain statistical records, yet each one of the mentioned behaviors
cannot be separated so easily from the desire for riches—a
dream implanted in large part by commercial entities that swirl
around professional sports.
[17] Second, Guttmann’s limited description of baseball’s
use of the seasons as one means of transmitting its pastoral element
allows him to call attention to a “dissonance” without
taking seriously the fan’s hope that can help bridge the gap. The
spring is strictly associated with fertility and birth without any
reference to the ‘death’ in the winter that precedes
it and gives the spring its meaning.(27) Guttmann's
books The Natural and Ball, Bat and Bishop provide
evidence of the psychological connection between the joy of a new
start and the spring, but leave out the moods and motivations of
the characters during the winter months. This neglect leaves
Guttmann unable to trace any kind of decline in popularity of baseball
to a modification or even a break in the symbolic cyclical flow. And
it is in these fissures that a critic can find a foothold and begin
to search for causes. If the commercialization of sport is
de-emphasized and the natural seasons that baseball employs are
considered as static, autonomous time periods, then for Guttmann,
the sport is plagued by no more than, “complexity,” “ambivalence,” resulting
in a, “paradoxical situation” for the analyst and fan
alike.(28)
Baseball as Life-Cycle Vehicle
[18] Before elucidating an explanation of breaks in the cyclical
flow, it is important to say more about the relationship between
baseball and its partner in nature. Baseball begins its season
in the spring, endures the heat of the summer, and terminates in
the fall. The emergence of life that signals the end of winter
provides a convenient backdrop for each new season. The hope
that accompanies any new beginning can be seen in the moods of fans
that believe that this is the year for their team. Teams battling
through the grueling summer mimic the struggles encountered in mid-life. And
finally in the same way that autumn announces death, the baseball
season culminates in the “death” of all teams but one. However,
the harsh reality of this fact is mitigated by the knowledge that
spring will eventually arrive again and with it, the opportunity
for each team to start with a clean slate. Thus death is symbolically
experienced yet later rendered impotent by the promise of a new
birth.
[19] One can certainly find ritualistic elements within football,
basketball and hockey, but baseball uniquely embodies the stages
of the seasonal life-cycle. For instance, football runs roughshod
over the varying weather patterns as the games are played despite
the conditions. Basketball and hockey, as exclusively indoor
sports, prevent the fan from associating the sports season with
anything happening outside the arena. These other sports,
of course, have cyclical seasons where life, death and life again
are experienced by the fan. Yet football, basketball, and
hockey are deprived of the use of the natural seasons as a substructure
to its sports seasons. Baseball, as a type of calendrical
rite, accomplishes the task.
[20] Clifford Geertz provides a description of the functional religious
ritual that can appropriate the idea of baseball as “life-cycle
vehicle” into the concrete experience of the fan. His
famous definition of religion(29) and
his conceptual tools for determining the success or failure of certain
religious rituals(30) can help
us take seriously baseball’s “pastoral reconciliation” as
well as furnish the means to understand the deleterious effects
of its financial disparity between teams.
[21] Geertz’ schema involves two key concepts: ethos and worldview. The
worldview of the members of a group is, “the picture they
have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive
ideas of order.”(31) Their
ethos reflects “the tone, character, and quality of their
life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood…”(32) To
put it crudely, one’s worldview provides the “is” component
of experience. We live, we die, and we are subject to certain
intractable patterns within nature and society. Yet certain “moods
and motivations,” with their accompanying moral impulses that
supply our ethos, resist that worldview continually thus rendering
life a perpetual “is/ought” dialectic. A religious
ritual resolves this tension by integrating one’s ethos and
worldview into a harmonious whole. Or, religious ritual “tunes
human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects images of
cosmic order onto the plane of experience.”(33) Everyday
experience is drawn up into a larger whole while the sheer incomprehensibility
of the metaphysical world is translated into a quotidian language. In
this way, the ethos and worldview aid each other for the purposes
of intelligibility without compromising the essence of either.
[22] In Geertzian language, the unyielding life cycle that plays
out in nature is “rendered emotionally convincing by being
presented as an image of an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged
to accommodate such a way of life.” Conversely, the
fan’s involvement with the baseball season is “rendered
intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life
ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the worldview describes…”(34) Thus
the baseball fan can, perhaps unwittingly, participate in a religious
ritual simply by following his/her team.
[23] Yet since the seasonal flow occurs beyond the range of human
interference, analysis of baseball’s competency as a medium
for the life-cycle must focus on the sport itself. And if
incompetency is detected, the ritual experience of baseball fans
and its breakdown can act as an instrument for critique. Armed
with this evidence along with Geertz’ formal categories, one
can examine the fan’s engagement with a sport that can potentially offer
a ritual experience and identify the sources of its failure to deliver.
Ethos and Worldview of Today’s Game
[24] Today’s game defies a simple definition, as exemplified
by, say, Whitman’s musings(35) on
the sport, that would aid the casual observer. Upon entering
the league, players find themselves pulled in a variety of directions—all
under the aegis of the game of baseball. In addition to attending
to the demands of the game, each player must play in an age where
the role of money and private enterprise in professional sports
swells annually. Each player averages over two million dollars
per season, while each new stadium bears the name of the corporation
that ponied up the most dough for its construction. As far
as the game of baseball is concerned, a purist(36) may
argue that money is a corroding element that should have no influence
over a game played between competitors. This idealism, however,
overlooks the fact that business has always been a part of
baseball. As evidence of this, look no further than the translocation
of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles by primary owner Walter O’Malley
in 1957 for strictly financial reasons.
[25] The purists, however, do express a sentiment that reflects
a widespread, but somewhat vague, notion of “the integrity
of the game.” Baseball is expected to keep the appearance
of its business at arm's length or more properly, keep its role
as a money-making instrument masked. To this end, baseball
has historically put its “enduring principles”(37) front
and centre. Some of these—fair play, winning, competition,
team loyalty, and hard work—occur without money playing a
pivotal part. Consequently, these principles can act as invisible
parameters that confine the normally boundless drive for capital
gain and place business ultimately in the service of the game itself. If
and when these barriers are lowered, money directly influences the
implementation of one of these principles, the sport is brought
to its knees. For example, baseball underwent no greater disgrace
in its history than the Black Sox scandal in 1919. The fixing
of some games by Shoeless Joe Jackson through his connection the
gambling industry mocked the whole notion of fair competition on
the field. Without baseball's punishment of the violators
in the strongest terms possible (permanent banishment from the game),
the sport would differ little from pro wrestling.
[26] The Black Sox scandal was destructive not so much because the
public naively thought that no one bet on baseball or that there
was no such gambling industry. Both activities have to do
with the pursuit of monetary gain. The scandal is found in
the real possibility that the game, which relies on players competing
strictly in the interest of winning the game, was altered by players
intentionally losing a game for a payoff. Apart from any major
scandal like this, the game of baseball is expected to stave off
anything that would corrupt its essence.
[27] The game/business tension held by baseball can be framed in
terms of ethos and worldview. For the sport to transmit a
life-cycle successfully, the players and teams must convey values
on and off the field that resonate with the fan of the big and small
market teams alike. This helps to temper the sting of death
at the end of the season. As a religious ritual, these values
comprise the “game” as it should be or in other words,
an ethos for the baseball fan. Conversely, the business side
of the game serves as a worldview for the fan. The intractability
of this worldview reveals itself in several ways. For instance,
each team does not have the choice of whether to be owned by a business
person or not. And the decision to buy a team is primarily
informed by the same facts that inform any deal in the market—is
it a good investment or not? Along with this purchase is the
expectation that the team will make money. Player salaries,
ticket prices, stadium-building—all factor into the investment
strategies of the owner. The laws of the market produce an “actual
state of affairs” that one must obey if a profit is to be
turned. When a player who has been traded from a good team
to a bad one expresses his resignation with the commonly heard phrase, “Well,
baseball is a business,” he is disclosing a reluctant acceptance
of a worldview.
[28] Remember that the Geertzian religious ritual integrates an
ethos and worldview as it presents an intelligible whole to its
participants. Hypothetically, if baseball players’ salaries
hovered around the national average of 40,000 a year and if teams
were only looking to provide a service to the fans with no incentive
for profit, the game would come off as unrealistic. The kind
of quixotic belief about players playing exclusively for
the love of the game, à laField of Dreams,
may reflect some imaginative ideal and generate money at the box
office, but is naïve given the brute reality of professional
baseball.
[29] The common knowledge that players sign the most lucrative contract
that the market will allow, assures the fan that the same system
that operates as his or her job also applies to the hero on the
field, albeit a qualitative, not quantitative, similarity. This
assurance is additionally bolstered by the fact that baseball has
games four or five days a week, thus further mimicking the structure
of the normal work week. Baseball thus draws the shrewd businessperson
into its arena where the laws of the market are suspended once the
umpire yells, “Play ball!” Of course, the market
is still operating, but behind the scenes. In this way, the
worldview subtly imbues the explicit presentation on the field,
a component of the ethos with a down-to-earth feel.
[30] Alternatively, the ethos confronts and legitimizes the cold,
hard dollars and cents aspect of the sport. It does so primarily
by positioning a team and its players that are clearly backed by
huge sums of cash as agents who can and must abandon their capitalistic
sensibilities when in competition. Fair competition between teams relies
on an environment that places all teams on an even playing field
in matters peripheral to the game itself, such as financial or legal
ones. Once one team is not allowed to use these matters as
leverage over another, the success of a team rises and falls with
decisions made to enable the ball club to win games. These
activities include everything from scouting for young talent to
making wise trades to managing the team effectively during a game
to hitting a grand slam homerun. Wins and losses are traced
to these kinds of decisions. For these decision-makers to
be fully appreciated, the fan assumes that no team possesses an
unfair advantage over the others before pursuing success.
[31] The worldview is brought into the service of the ethos of the
game. This is the other side of the ethos/worldview relationship
where the rules of the market are sublimated by the implicit and
explicit rules of the game and given a softened, more purposeful
expression. Granted, the fan cannot avoid observing the trappings
of capitalism that surround the game from the rotating billboards
behind home plate to the television commercials that use players
as pitchmen. Baseball, though, achieves its status as a Geertzian
religious ritual not by disallowing these expressions but by integrating
them into its ethos. Successful integration requires the appearance
of the suspension of laws that govern the economy in favour of the
manifest spirit of fair competition between teams. The fan
can rest assured that her sport is, on one level, in step with her
worldview but unique enough to limit its power for the sake of the
game.
[32] What is the current state of baseball for the fan in
terms of its ethos and worldview? Simply put, the worldview of
the fan of a small-market team, or the interpretation of the business
side of baseball, is modifying and in ways subordinating the authority
of the ethos—a reversal of the roles previously discussed. Instead
of the game limiting the authority of self-interested owners and
players, it has allowed both groups to pursue profit unchecked. The
effects of this development are now manifest. Players’ salaries
have risen to the point that the amount of money they make has become
a lens through which the fan sees the athlete’s performance
on the field. Instead of using statistics as the primary mark
of value, the fan now is encouraged to ask if a player’s ability
is commensurate with his salary. And more importantly, fans
of most small-market teams are all too aware of the main reason
for losing seasons. Similarly to the way fans judge players,
fans of small and even middle market teams judge their quality in
terms of the amount of money spent or by the speculative amount
believed to be spent by the owner (see n. 17). There is very
little masking of the power that market forces wield over the game,
hence the prominent place that money holds in fans’ minds. The
fact that losses are translated into statements that “our” teams
cannot field, “good players because we can't pay them” expresses
the phenomenon of unmasking well. The internal developing
and managing of players as well as their own internal improvement
are components of the ethos of the game—not the purchase of
good players simply because you can. And when those owners
can and do build their teams as a company would in the private sector,
fans who are left to trust their teams’ wins to mediocre players
have no recourse against the seemingly intractable system. When
the new baseball season should generate the hope that each team
has a realistic shot at realizing the goal towards which that hope
is directed and a championship is an unrealistic goal before
the season starts, hope is lost. Consequently, baseball’s
ability to convey a meaningful life-cycle is severely compromised
and a breakdown of the Geertzian religious ritual for the fan results
Conclusion
[34] Certainly baseball continues to provoke a kind of ethereal
hope by virtue of its beginning in April, yet it no longer delivers
a tangible product that can inspire hope. Given this situation,
it is not difficult to understand the reasons for fan apathy in
the face of a player’s strike or for the spirit of resignation
that moves through a small-market city. On the surface, fans
expressed their dissatisfaction with greedy players and owners when
asked to reflect on last year’s potential strike. This
is a justified reaction, and one that can fit into a Geertzian
schema, but it does not tell the whole story. The greed that
underlies much of the profit motive has always been there. Yet
we now witness a sport that has allowed its teams to operate more
in response to the market than to the principles of the game that
once safeguarded it from such contamination.
[35] Admittedly, the manner in which money now contributes to fan
dissatisfaction is different from the way in which gambling scandals
do. The latter is more acute, brazen and unambiguous. Consequently,
the infection is localized; treatment is swift and effective. Alternatively,
the exclusion of small-market teams from an opportunity at a championship
occurs without much grounded critical reaction. One reason
for this is that the owners of big market teams are operating under
accepted market dictates; they are not cheating. Nevertheless,
the amount of money being spent by different teams a massive contributing
factor to the success and demise of varying teams. If we can
admit that this discrepancy is at all due to a cost-benefit analysis
performed by the owner, then we must also admit of the unmistakable
influence on the nature of the competition on the field that purely
economic decisions wield. That money won or lost on the stock
market affects the degree of commitment by an owner to better his
or her team makes this current practice akin to fixing games. Yet
the fixing of a game presumably corrupts one game (though the effects
may reverberate longer) while the unrestricted purchasing of the
best players year after year modifies the structure of the sport
that can maintain itself for seasons. Hence an alteration
on this scale and with this kind of subtlety cannot be identified
and challenged with legal sanction or moral outrage (like that levied
against Pete Rose).
[36] I have identified the impact that rampant spending has on the
hope that each fan should rightfully possess in the spring. If
an association can be made between the two, which I have attempted
to do by situating an ethos/worldview within a life-cycle ritual
experience, analysis of a breakdown in either ritual can elucidate
the normally murky problems that baseball fans have with their sport. This
connection can be seen as a type of “pastoral reconciliation“ described
by Guttmann, but its makeup allows criticism when the connection
is not made—an allowance not emerging from Guttmann’s
descriptions. More importantly, the term “religious” can
be reasonably stretched to characterize the dynamics of the
current game of baseball, thus problematizing the strict correlation
between sport and ancient cosmic religions that Guttmann makes in
his conceptual voyage from ritual to record.
[37] Lurking in this paper is an underlying critique of the pure
activity of profit-making, yet it can only surface when positioned
next to an activity such as the playing the game of baseball on
the field. The way in which baseball generates hope not only
by virtue of being a seasonal sport but also by its use of the natural
seasonal flow reveals a religious dimension not emphasized enough
by previous scholars. And when this hope is altered and diminished
by agents operating outside of the means to better a baseball team
from within, this religious dimension cannot exert itself fully
into the psyches of certain fans, and the game that used to evoke
fervor will continue to disappoint fans for all of the wrong reasons.
Notes
1. George F. Will, Bunts (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 271.
2. Bob Costas, Fair Ball (New
York: Broadway Books, 2000), 2.
3. Joseph Price, “From
Season to Season,” in From Season to Season, ed. Joseph
Price (Macon, GA: Mercer Univ. Press, 2001), 56.
4. Christopher H. Evans and William
R. Herzog II, eds., The Faith of Fifty Million, Baseball, Religion,
and American Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press,
2002).
5. Allen Guttmann, From Ritual
to Record, The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1978).
6. Allen Guttmann, A Whole
New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
7. G. Edward White, Creating
the National Pastime, Baseball Transforms Itself (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4.
8. Evans and Herzog, Faith
of Fifty Million, 2-3.
9. Guttmann, New Ball Game,
101-4.
10. White, National Pastime,
7.
11. White, National Pastime,
6.
12. The difference between the
richest and poorest teams in 1988 was 30 million dollars. In
2004, the difference was 168 million dollars.
13. Economist Andrew Zimbalist,
in his recent book May the Best Team Win (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institute Press, 2004), 43, cites a startling fact: “During
the seven years from 1995 to 2001 only four teams from the bottom
half of payrolls reached the postseason, I which altogether, they
won a total out of 5 out of 224 games. None of these four
bottom payroll teams went beyond the first round of the playoffs.”
14. http://www.baseball-almanac.com/ws/wstv.shtml It should be noted that one reason for this trend is an increased
number of viewing options with the onset of cable television thus
diluting the pool. Though
options were still available before cable. In addition,
it is a fact that cable stations such as WGN, TBS and ESPN have
put far more baseball on television over the last 20 years.
15.New York Times, August
17, 2002.
16. http://archive.salon.com/news/sports/col//barra/2001/08/22/baseball/
17. Michael Lewis, Moneyball:
The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (New York: Norton, 2003).
18. The Minnesota Twins are
another example of a team that has had success (since the Twins
of 1999 in Costas’ example) based on baseball decisions—specifically
through developing an outstanding farm system. However, as
Costas points out, once a Minnesota player succeeds in the majors
(Chuck Knoblauch in this case) he is snatched up by a big-market
team (Costas, Fair Ball, 2-3)
19. I say “may” here
for a reason. In Buster Olney’s The Last Night of
the Yankee Dynasty: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness (New
York: Ecco Press, 2004), he argues that the Yankees’ brazen
and even reckless purchasing of talented players actually turned
off some Yankees’ fans themselves.
20. Zimbalist, Best Team,
51.
21.Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist
John O’Brien, writes about his Pittsburgh Pirates, “the
managements are now so dominated by money—getting it, keeping
some, paying it out and having enough to make ends meet in a rough
pro sports environment—that winning championships isn't even
an option… Sadly, there appears to be no end in sight to
this "get rid of the good players because we can't pay them" mentality.
And perhaps that makes the fans think some unwritten social pact
has been violated—the one that says we'll come to see the
games if you try hard to field the best teams. We'd hate to see
the teams leave town. But what do we fans really lose now if they
do?… it's not because Joltin' Joe has left and gone away,
a hero retired, an era of heroes ended. He's still around. He's
just gone to the rich teams, and is no longer here … team
owners have devalued the idea of fielding a team that has at least
an outside chance of competing for a championship. Call it structural
problems in baseball ... Call it greed by the team owners and the
players, or shortsightedness and cowardice in the leagues' offices. (http://www.post-gazette.com/forum/comm/20030308eddiary08p2.asp)
Or from Cincinnati Post columnist Tony Parker: “The
Reds allowed baseball's trading deadline to pass without making
another deal on Wednesday, providing another example of why, realistically,
this small-market, budget-constrained team has little chance to
reach the postseason. And in case their fans didn't get the message,
the Reds then took the field and offered yet another reason … On
the mound was their most recent trade acquisition, right-hander
Brian Moehler. In the other dugout was one of those big-market behemoths
the Reds only wish they could be like, the free-spending, conglomerate-owned
Los Angeles Dodgers (http://www.cincypost.com/2002/aug/01/reds080102.html).
22. Guttmann, New Ball Game,
108.
23. Guttmann, New Ball Game,
109.
24. William J. Morgan expresses
this distinction well in his application of Alaisdair MacIntyre’s
treatment of practices to modern sport in Leftist Theories of
Sport: A Critique and Reconstruction (Urbana, IL: University
of Illinois Press, 1994), 130-47.
25. Guttmann, New Ball Game,16.
26. Guttmann, New Ball Game,
3.
27. Guttmann, New Ball Game,
104-6.
28. Guttmann, New Ball Game,
114.
29. Clifford Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973),
90
30. Geertz, Interpretation,
112-3.
31. Geertz, Interpretation,
89.
32. Geertz, Interpretation,
89.
33. Geertz, Interpretation, 90.
34. Geertz, Interpretation,
90.
35. “I see great things
in baseball. It's our game—the American game. It
will take people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them
a large physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a
nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing
to us" (Walt Whitman, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 23,
1846).
36. An example of a purist can
be found in broadcaster Jon Miller as he takes a stand in his Confessions
of a Baseball Purist, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2000).
37. Costas, Fair Ball,
32.
