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.