Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-14575-6 — The Cambridge Companion to Baseball Edited by Leonard Cassuto , Stephen Partridge Excerpt More Information LEONARD CASSUTO Introduction Pearls Before Swine , a daily comic strip written by Californian Stephan Pastis and syndicated in more than 500 newspapers, ran a series of strips in 2005 in which one of the characters, a bear, goes on a cross-country trip to “try and fi nd the one person who can bring this divided country together.” That person turns out to be Willie Mays . “You were baseball, Mr. Mays,” says the bear. “You were the greatest player in the history of the game and an icon of a past era that somehow seems better than today.” 1 The bear’s view of baseball – and its inverse – lie at the heart of this book. Like many observers, the bear sees baseball as special compared to other games, and he sees baseball’s glorifi ed past as mythically different from, yet somehow still deeply connected to, its fallen present. Moreover, baseball history somehow corresponds to American history in the bear’s mind: the game’s great past is also the nation’s. So he thinks the person most qualifi ed to rescue the country is a long-retired baseball player. This link to national character sets baseball apart from other American sports. It arises from baseball’s much-heralded reputation as the “national pastime,” but the meaning of that epithet is as hazy as that of “American Dream,” another pneumatic concept that fl oats in the same precincts. (“National pastime” is in fact the older of the two terms, dating back to baseball’s nineteenth-century beginnings. “American Dream” was coined during the Depression .) Like “American Dream ,” the idea of a national pastime con- jures up inchoate yet idealized visions – equal parts myth and pastoral fan- tasy. These visions always inform, and frequently distort, views of past and present together. Murray Ross , in a well-known 1970 essay, suggests that baseball was “conceived in nostalgia” and was thus “old-fashioned from the start.” The game does, says Ross, “what all good pastoral does – it creates an atmosphere in which everything exists in harmony.” 2 Historically, professional baseball has exploited such associations with extraordinary dexterity. The reality is that baseball is part sport and part business – big business. From its humble roots in boys’ sandlots and men’s amateur club fi elds, the 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-14575-6 — The Cambridge Companion to Baseball Edited by Leonard Cassuto , Stephen Partridge Excerpt More Information Leonard Cassuto game has become a multi-billion-dollar worldwide entertainment enter- prise whose audience (and participants) extend from South America to Japan . Professional baseball players, once racially segregated , middle-class workers, are now unionized, much-scrutinized, multicultural, and wealthy. Professional baseball teams, once concentrated in the eastern United States, now spread over the continent, with leagues all over the world. The cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu links sports to class distinctions, with people’s choices tending to “express all the differences sociologic- ally pertinent at that moment: oppositions between the sexes, between the classes, and between class fractions.” Bourdieu suggests that the more accessible a sport is, the more the “dominant class,” which wants distance for itself, will disdain it – hence the elitist reputations of sports like skiing and tennis. It’s striking how poorly baseball fi ts Bourdieu’s model, for the game tends to collapse such sex and class distinctions. Baseball appears to have far more female fans than other male sports, and its male stereotypes range from loud, beer-drinking rooters to highbrow intellectuals like the political commentator George Will , who has written two books on baseball and follows the game avidly as a fan. One might say, following Bourdieu’s reasoning elsewhere, that baseball possesses a kind of “cultural capital” unique among American sports that allows it to break down barriers rather than reinforcing them. 3 Truly, baseball is America’s game. It’s also America’s prism, refl ecting (and refracting) the concerns of US and greater American society over nearly two centuries. The game has received serious attention from artists, storytellers, and scholars, giving it a voluminous lore that is also unmatched in American sport . The Cambridge Companion to Baseball sets one foot in baseball’s past – both its idealized and real versions. Both are crucial, for in baseball, a deep and rich mythology not only accompanies its reality but also greatly affects it. That mythology is notably interwoven with national ideology in a way that sometimes makes the two hard to separate. (The character of Babe Ruth is a case in point: he’s both a baseball legend and the hero of a quint- essentially American upward mobility story, two identities that have had real-life effects on real-life people. a ) This book also locates itself in baseball’s present, as a ubiquitous social, economic, and even political presence in the culture. The story of baseball is, in an important way, the story of the interaction between the myth of the national pastime and the reality of the baseball business. The tension between the two is what drives this book. a See the interchapter on Babe Ruth in this volume, 45–48. 2 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-14575-6 — The Cambridge Companion to Baseball Edited by Leonard Cassuto , Stephen Partridge Excerpt More Information Introduction The fantastic lore of baseball begins with its founding myths, the most famous of which has Abner Doubleday inventing the game before going on to become a Civil War general. (That story, and others related to it, are debunked in the fi rst chapter of this book, which traces the early evolution of the game’s rules.) The romance of baseball’s origin myths laid the foun- dation for a likewise romantic past full of whitewashed heroes (and I use the term “whitewashed” advisedly) from Ty Cobb to Mickey Mantle . Almost everything a boy could learn about baseball during the fi rst half of the twentieth century was wrapped in gauze and perfumed with diamond dust. A bird fl ies out from under Casey Stengel ’s cap. St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck sends a midget up to hit in a major league game. (He wears uniform number 1/8.) Owners and players gallantly put aside their bats and balls to fi ght for freedom when Uncle Sam calls them to battle. Joe DiMaggio marries Marilyn Monroe. Jimmy Piersall runs around the bases backwards. Gambling taints baseball once in 1919, but the game expunges it. Racism is invisible until Jackie Robinson suddenly appears to defeat it. All of these things are true – more or less. They’re the kernels of some of the game’s great stories. They also promote the notion that baseball is in essence a boy’s game possessing a lovable innocence that it is somehow able to identify and celebrate. (This is a contradiction in terms because if you know what innocence is, then you’re no longer innocent.) Baseball’s place in American culture owes much to sleight of hand like this, which keeps the sport’s stories clean and simple. Nevertheless, those stories have an underside that for years rarely saw the light. As Richard Crepeau details in Chapter 6 , baseball’s response to war was much more venal than advertised, even if Ted Williams was an actual fl ying ace. The little person Eddie Gaedel worked as a mascot after his one turn at bat for the Browns, drank heavily, and died young. DiMaggio’s marriage didn’t last long . Piersall was hospitalized for mental illness. The 1919 “Black Sox” gambling scandal harbors mysteries that have never been solved. And through it all, African Americans had to play in their own leagues because Major League Baseball was segregated – and as Matthew Jacobson demonstrates in his interchapter in this volume, racism hardly disappeared even after the game was thoroughly integrated. The Boston Red Sox , for example, didn’t sign their fi rst black player until three years after Jackie Robinson retired. Baseball became a business almost as soon as the rules were agreed upon in the mid nineteenth century. Labor disputes were suppressed, and accounts of them downplayed. Who but the most historically immersed fans know of the challenge to Major League Baseball by the upstart Federal League in 1914? (Andrew Zimbalist discusses it in Chapter 14 .) The game has zeal- ously guarded its mythology – and its economic hegemony, which includes 3 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-14575-6 — The Cambridge Companion to Baseball Edited by Leonard Cassuto , Stephen Partridge Excerpt More Information Leonard Cassuto an antitrust exemption. It has done so even as franchise relocations have exposed the bottom-line relation of baseball teams to cities and made the economic realities of the professional game more obvious. The most notori- ous such move was of course the relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958, considered by David Finoli in Chapter 7 as part of a larger survey of this subject. But the story of baseball is more complicated than a group of capitalists running a lucrative, private, and mostly secret business. Baseball really was a tool of Americanization , with all the power its mythology implies. It really did help immigrants fi nd a place in the culture, as Samuel O. Regalado details in his account in Chapter 4 of Japanese and Mexican Americans in the early twentieth century.

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