America’s National Pastime Can Offer a Model of Redemption
A recurring challenge for me as a Wednesday columnist on international politics is that every four years I must compose my column before the outcome of the U.S. presidential election is clear. So after a campaign season that saw U.S. politics plunge into ever-greater depths of polarization, I thought I'd write about a contest that had been decided at the time of writing—this year's World Series, won by the Los Angeles Dodgers over the New York Yankees—and the kinder, gentler vision of the U.S. one can still find in baseball fields and stadiums across the country. As a crucial symbol of shared identity, understanding the importance of baseball to life in the U.S. can provide indications of how the country can overcome the challenges it faces in an age of polarization and populism.
As an offshoot of ball games that had their origins in early modern England, baseball's history as a sport parallels the emergence of the U.S. as an independent republic. Yet its codification through Abner Doubleday's set of formal rules in the 1830s and 1840s also drew on influences from Canadian versions of the game, an early demonstration of how baseball could be both a symbol of U.S. identity as well as a form of transnational culture shared with many other societies. By 1900, though entrenched racial structures prevented the integration of non-white players for another half century, baseball had become America's national pastime, linking a grassroots game involving people of all class backgrounds with financially lucrative professional leagues made up of clubs with huge fan bases.
The game's underlying value system in the century that followed still embodied its roots in the democratic ideals of the early American republic, without sacrificing its connections with the cultural traditions of other societies. By the 1950s, baseball had spread so widely in countries with which the U.S. had strong interactions that successful leagues had been established in Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Japan and other states around Asia and the Western Hemisphere. And though structural racism meant that white, African American and Latino players played in separate leagues until after World War II, the sport's transnational links as well as growing moral qualms over racial segregation in the U.S. led to a dismantling of racial barriers in 1947, over a decade before desegregation in the U.S. South began to take hold.
Though Black American players still face racism from some fans, the signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 along with the decisive role played by Larry Doby and Satchel Paige on a Cleveland team that won the World Series a year later were significant steps toward the tearing down of racial barriers across U.S. politics and culture. However imperfect and faltering the process of integration was in reality, from the 1940s onward baseball as a hallowed national institution became a space in which the children of Italian American and Jewish American immigrants, such as Joe DiMaggio and Sandy Koufax, could compete alongside Black Americans who emerged from the deepest poverty, like Hank Aaron. That Aaron received a standing ovation in 1974 after breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record from fans in Atlanta, Georgia—which only 15 years before was still a segregated city—symbolized how baseball had helped build a better America by becoming a national pastime for all Americans.
Perhaps the moment that best symbolized how baseball could help heal racial and class injustices for which one of the sport's franchises itself was responsible can be found in the reconciliation between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the city's Mexican American community. The initial rift was the product of the Dodgers' move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957, when a neighborhood was demolished to make way for the team's new stadium, resulting in the mass expulsion of thousands of Mexican Americans. However much the sport had become a symbol of integration in other U.S. cities, until the 1981 season the idea that the Dodgers could ever build a strong Latino fanbase seemed almost unthinkable.
At a time when the very foundations of U.S. democracy seem under attack, baseball continues to model the country's pursuit of a better future.
Yet under the leadership of manager Tommy Lasorda, a son of Italian immigrants who as a player and coach had spent time in leagues across Latin America, the Dodgers gradually introduced more Latino players to their roster. The final breakthrough came in the 1981 season, when the extraordinary performance of Fernando Valenzuela—a rookie Mexican pitcher who had still been working on his father's farm in Sonora only a few years before—led the Dodgers to a World Series victory. That cemented the lasting loyalty of Latino communities in California to a baseball club they could finally identify with. The tickertape parade celebrating the club's victory in this year's World Series took place in front of fans from all of Los Angeles' communities, a testament to how the twin legacies of Lasorda and Valenzuela helped turn baseball into a space for collective solidarity in what can often be a socially fractured city.
As with any other cultural institution, baseball has of course also been regularly exposed to economic and social pressures that compromised the sport's codes of honor. Huge sums of money and a cult of celebrity surrounding the professional game from its earliest years have meant that scandals involving gambling, alcohol and narcotics have consumed every generation of players, from the entire Chicago White Sox team in 1919 to legends of the game from the 1980s such as Pete Rose and Darryl Strawberry. In the 1980s and 1990s, contract disputes between team owners and players led to strikes that disrupted seasons, while scandals involving the use of banned performance-enhancing steroids by some of the game's biggest players in the 2000s shattered public trust in ways that pushed baseball into deep crisis in the years that followed.
For the moment, baseball also remains a largely patriarchal space, in which the women's game is still treated by sports media as a largely secondary concern. Though the growing number of female players at levels just below the Major Leagues is a potential indication that the barriers between genders within the sport could fall away, such a final step to representing the full breadth of the American experience may still take another generational cycle to achieve.
Yet for all the problems baseball still faces, its unique seasonal rhythm from April to October and its anchoring in over a century and a half of tradition still set it apart from newer professional sports that now overshadow it. If baseball is the sport of the American Republic, then in some ways the rise of the National Football League since the 1960s as a form of immensely lucrative mass entertainment reflects the militarized outlook of the U.S. as a postwar global superpower. However fascinating American football can be, its sheer ferocity as a full-contact sport and the local and national jingoism embraced by its fan cultures make even the worst excesses of baseball look restrained by comparison.
More recently, the corporate marketing of such brutal combat sports as the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, has run in parallel with a broader coarsening of American public life. Without a minimal basic rule set compared to the degree of restraint in more traditional forms of boxing or wrestling, UFC bouts play on the kind of gladiatorial bloodlust that mirrors the growing power of populist demagogues who have undermined basic constitutional norms. Though this starkly Darwinian world will never entirely overwhelm the golden nostalgia that underpins baseball's celebration of solidarity and codes of honor, the growing popularity of the UFC is a worrying indication of how far an authoritarian cult of violence may have embedded itself among particular demographics in the United States.
For the moment, however, baseball still has the power to inspire new generations of Americans. However much Lasorda's death on Jan. 7, 2021, marked the end of an era at a time when the very foundations of U.S. democracy seemed under attack, the sport continues to model the country's pursuit of a better future. As the U.S. faces more years of uncertainty, there will always be Americans who will continue to uphold values that can help breathe new life into their republic, in baseball and many other walks of life.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King's College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union's border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.
