Baseball As the National Pastime: A Fiction Whose Time Is Past

Abstract

This article argues that ‘baseball-as-the-national-pastime' is a fine example of the ‘narrative construction of reality' concept advanced by psychologist Jerome Bruner. That is, baseball's endlessly self-pronounced, fictional claim to being the American ‘national-pastime' has run its course. By this late date, it is exhausted but not dead, sacked by the National Football League and many other sports and pastimes in an increasingly fragmented, heterogeneous culture.

Keywords::

• baseball
• history
• cultural fiction
• nationalism
• nostalgia

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and thank Mark Dyreson, Greg Pfitzer, Susan Taylor and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this article. I would also like to thank Mark for organising and hosting the 2012 The Lives (and Deaths) of American National Pastimes workshop at Penn State University, where I first presented a version of this work. It was a stimulating, productive and memorable event, largely due to the participants' collegiality and good cheer.

Notes

^1.Coffin, The Old Ball Game, 3.

^2. Ibid.

^3. Ibid.

^4.Dyreson, ‘National Pastimes’.

^5.New Oxford American Dictionary.

^6.Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15.

^7.New Oxford American Dictionary.

^8.Oxford English Dictionary, accessed September 12, 2012, http://www.oed.com.lucy2.skidmore.edu:2048/view/Entry/138604?rskey = RZdEAs&result = 2&isAdvanced = false#eid.

^9. This is what Bryan Curtis seems to mean in ‘The National Pastime(s)’, New York Times, January 31, 2009.

^10.Wann et al., Sport Fans, 2.

^11.Levine, A. G. Spalding and the Rise, 147.

^12. National Sports of Canada Act, http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/N-16.7/page-1.html, accessed June 4, 2013.

^13.Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 100.

^14.Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 48.

^15.Lever, Soccer Madness, 14.

^16.Mills, The Power Elite.

^17.Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years, 4.

^18. Matthew Hay Brown, ‘U.S. Is Most Religious in Industrialized World’, Baltimore Sun, December 16, 2009, accessed April 6, 2013, http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/faith/2009/12/united_states_is_most_religiou.html.

^19.Nathanson, A People's History of Baseball, xi.

^20.Barzun, God's Country and Mine, 151.

^21. Ken Burns, Baseball, Inning 1, ‘Our Game' (1840s–1900). Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Geoffrey C. Ward, Baseball. DVD. Hollywood, CA: PBS Home Video, distributed by Paramount Home Entertainment, 2004.

^22. Burns, Baseball, Inning 1, ‘Our Game' (1840s–1900).

^23.Geertz, ‘Deep Play’, 28.

^24. Geertz adds, ‘As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring’. Geertz, ‘Deep Play’, 5.

^25.Gmelch, Baseball without Borders; Gildner, The Warsaw Sparks.

^26. ‘Can't Anyone Here Take This Quiz?’ Village Voice, August 18, 1992.

^27. Bennett Miller, Moneyball. DVD. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012.

^28.Tygiel, ‘Our National Spirit’, 27.

^29.Peverelly, The Book of American Pastimes, 337.

^30.Berry, The Philosophy of Athletics, 183.

^31.Grella, ‘Baseball and the American Dream’, 550.

^32.Bruner, ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, 4.

^33. Quoted in Jackson, The Story Is True, ix.

^34.Davis, Fiction in the Archives, 3.

^35.Bruner, ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, 6.

^36.Gould, ‘The Creation Myths of Cooperstown’.

^37. Lipsyte, ‘In Memoriam’, New York Times, September 15, 1994.

^38.Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 1.

^39. See note 36 above.

^40.McGimpsey, Imagining Baseball, 5.

^41. Quoted in Nathan, Baseball Quotations, 38.

^42.Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 100. For more on baseball's popularity in the nineteenth century, see Lamoreaux, ‘Baseball in the Late Nineteenth Century’; Gelber, ‘Working at Play’; and Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden.

^43.Nathan, Saying It's So, 217.

^44.Hamerow, Reflections on History and Historians, 212.

^45.Dyreson, ‘National Pastimes’, 12.

^46.Elias, The Empire Strikes Out.

^47.Zimbalist, Baseball and Billions.

^48.Zimbalist, ‘Baseball's Economic Development’, 212.

^49. Mahler, ‘Is the Game Over?’ New York Times, September 29, 2013.

^50. Zimbalist, Baseball and Billions, 4; Ruck, Raceball, 195–221.

^51.Will, Bunts, 28.

^52. Richard Ford, ‘Stop Blaming Baseball’, New York Times Magazine, April 4, 1993, 40.

^53.Faragher et al., Out of Many, 420.

^54.Alexander, ‘Review of G. Edward White's’, 553.

^55.Folsom, ‘America's “Hurrah Game'”, 70.

^56.Blight, Race and Reunion, 18; quoted in Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 508.

^57.Benjamin Rader says, ‘Perhaps Whitman exaggerated baseball's importance and its congruency with American life'. Rader, Baseball, xv.

^58.Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, 194.

^59.Folsom, ‘America's “Hurrah Game'”, 69.

^60.Alexander, Our Game, 50.

^61.Heaphy, The Negro Leagues, 1869–1960, 14.

^62. Quoted in White, Sol White's History of Colored Baseball, 139.

^63.Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 272–91.

^64. See note 20.

^65.Block, Baseball before We Knew It, 104.

^66.Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, 57.

^67.Birrell and McDonald, Reading Sport, 5.

^68.Shattuck, ‘Women's Baseball in the 1860s’, 2.

^69.Ackmann, Curveball; Ardell, Breaking into Baseball; Berlage, Women in Baseball; Johnson, When Women Played Hardball; Heaphy and May, Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball; and Ring, Stolen Bases.

^70. Quoted in Johnson, When Women Played Hardball, 83.

^71. In 2001, according to Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal, ‘46.5% of MLB fans' were women. Of course, just because many women and girls are MLB fans does not mean the game is a gender-neutral activity or institution. Being a fan is one thing; playing the game, being a manager, a general manager, a coach, an umpire, a baseball writer, a broadcaster and so on are fundamentally and categorically different kinds of participation and investment. See Langdon Brockinton, ‘Numbers Up, but MLB, NFL Increase Efforts to Lure Women’, Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal, December 24, 2001, accessed October 5, 2013, http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2001/12/20011224/Special-Report/Numbers-Up-But-MLB-NFL-Increase-Efforts-To-Lure-Women.aspx?hl = 46.5%25%20MLB%20fans%20women&sc = 0.

^72.Hall, Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, 30.

^73. See note 36 above.

^74. George Carlin, ‘American Bullshit’, You Are All Diseased. CD. New York: Atlantic, 1999.

^75.Bryant, Shut Out, viii.

^76.Nathanson, A People's History of Baseball, 99.

^77.Rosen, Scandals of '51; Blackwell, On Brave Old Army Team.

^78.Congdon, Baseball and Memory, 75.

^79. Robert Lipsyte, ‘The Emasculation of Sports’, New York Times Magazine, April 2, 1995, 52.

^80. George Roy, Steven Stern, and David Harmon, When It Was a Game. VHS. New York: HBO Video, 1991.

^81.Bowden, The Best Game Ever.

^82.Rader, Baseball, xvii.

^83. Quoted in Ward and Burns, Baseball, 20.

^84. Robert Lipsyte, ‘The Dying Game’, Esquire, April 1993, 100, 105.

^85.Ross, ‘Football Red and Baseball Green’; Guttmann, From Ritual to Record, 91–136; Carlin, ‘Baseball Football’, accessed April 9, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = qmXacL0Uny0.

^86. J.R. Moehringer, ‘Football Is Dead: Long Live Football’, ESPN: The Magazine, September 2012, 57.

^87. Quoted in Sid Hartman, ‘Selig Takes Pride in MLB's Attendance Growth’, Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 2, 2012.

^88.(http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/current_attendance.shtml, accessed June 4, 2013).

^89.Butterworth, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity, 5.

^90. Ford, ‘Stop Blaming Baseball’, 42.

^91. At the 2012 workshop where this paper was first presented, I was pleased to learn that cultural studies scholar David Andrews, who lives in Baltimore, also follows the Orioles on the Internet late into the night.

^92.Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, ix.

^93.Nathanson, A People's History of Baseball, 157.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel A. Nathan

Daniel A. Nathan is an Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies at Skidmore College, the author of the award-winning Saying It's So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal (2003), and the editor of Rooting For the Home Team: Sport, Community and Identity (2013). He is the President of the North American Society for Sport History.