“Integrity, Sportsmanship, Character”: Baseball’s Moral Entrepreneurs and the Production and Reproduction of Institutional Autonomy

ABSTRACT

Sociologists have long argued that institutions like religion or the economy can become relatively distinct spheres that facilitate and constrain action, goal setting, and decision-making. But few empirical studies have looked closely at how institutions become relatively distinct cultural and structural domains. This paper examines how institutional entrepreneurs—in this case, Major League Baseball (MLB) sportswriters—build and sustain institutional boundaries by considering how they create a distinct cultural discourse that infuses baseball places, times, and events with culturally distinct meanings. Drawing from sportswriters’ columns, documentaries, and monographs written on baseball I show that MLB entrepreneurs have developed and disseminated a discourse oriented around the generalized medium of sport exchange, interaction, and communication: competitiveness. Using these data, this article examines how baseball writing becomes quantified and embodied in tangible and intangible forms. Additionally, the paper draws on sport columns that illustrate how MLB entrepreneurs protect the autonomy of a sacred core (the Hall of Fame) from internal threats (gambling and performance-enhancing drugs) and external corruption (the influence of money). The paper ends with a discussion of implications for the applicability of the findings to other sports and institutional domains.

KEYWORDS:

• Baseball
• cultural sociology
• institutions
• moral entrepreneurship
• sport

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers, editors, and Justin Van Ness for comments and suggestions on previous drafts. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation for my former graduate assistant, Anthony Lemonis, who was largely responsible for compiling the data used herein.

Notes

1. The definition of “institution” is rather murky despite its centrality in sociology since Durkheim and Spencer. For the purposes of the discussion institutions are considered macro domains that vary in terms of how distinct they are from each other (Abrutyn 2014). Though abstract and invisible, as institutions grow more autonomous we can see their outlines in the ways they change physical, temporal, social, and symbolic space.

2. For the sake of brevity the focus of this article is on professional sports. However, the Olympics is an example of how formalized amateur sports may become.

3. The New York and Los Angeles Times, respectively, prohibit writers from voting, citing conflict of interest; yet these writers still weigh in on the debate.

4. Some authors had two-part columns explaining their votes while for others the data had to be collected both from the official news sources they work for and the blogs they posted to further clarify their position.

5. Because of space limitations morning-edition newspapers chose some metrics over others in reporting the previous night’s scores.

6. As of 2017 Raines has been elected, while it was recently announced that the Veterans’ Committee—a group of retired players who can elect players who fall off the ballot—selected Morris for the 2018 class. Schilling, however, presents a fascinating case in that he has many of the intangibles necessary for enshrinement, as noted above. Yet there is much debate every year about whether his quantitative measures or his outspoken conservativism (he was suspended and eventually fired by ESPN for bigoted tweets) hurt his candidacy most.

7. The next closest hitter, Ty Cobb, who Rose surpassed, set the hit mark in 1928; it took 53 years for the record to be broken. Since Rose retired no one has come within 500 hits of his mark (or, the equivalent of three exceptional seasons of hitting).

8. Thirty-one players have reached this number: twenty-five are in the HOF, two are still playing (Ichiro Suzuki and Adrian Beltre), one (Derek Jeter) just retired and is talked about as a lock for the HOF, while the remaining three are not likely to gain entrance because of gambling (Pete Rose) and suspected cheating (Rafael Palmeiro and Alex Rodriguez).

9. Twenty-seven players have reached this number: eighteen are in the HOF, one is still playing, and two have yet to become eligible for election—one of those may not get in because of his known PED use (Rodriguez). Of the remaining six cases, election is in doubt because of known or suspected PED use, with three having already fallen off the ballot.

10. Twenty-four players have reached this mark: twenty-three are in the HOF while one, Roger Clemens, who has the ninth-most wins in baseball history, is another case of PED use whose fate remains underdetermined.

11. Said one voter regarding why he did not vote for recent candidate Fred McGriff (McNeal 2014): “Seven more homers and he would have hit the magic number of 500. But a line has to be drawn somewhere and given that power was his biggest asset, he falls seven homers short of my vote.”

12. For comparison, the National Football League HOF (opened in 1963) has 287 members; the National Basketball Association HOF (1959) has 335; and the National Hockey League HOF (1945) has 381 members, 260 of which are players.

13. The average team, according to various sources, is valued at $1.3 billion with the New York Yankees estimated at $3.4 billion.

14. One of the more notable baseball comedies, Major League, centered on an owner’s widow attempting to strip the Cleveland Indians of nearly all its material resources in hopes of fielding a team so bad that she could move it to Florida. The comedy played off the well-worn idea that owner’s interests directly conflict with the players, fans, and sportswriters—an idea, incidentally, found in other sports movies like the Paul Newman hockey film Slapstick.