When I was young, it was not unusual for us to gather at any open space they could find and play baseball. We played in vacant lots, cul-de-sacs, and if we could, we climbed the fence at the nearby school field. When my brothers and I moved to the Midwest, we cast covetous eyes on a nearby green-painted, deserted ballpark, complete with stands, outfield fence and real bases. However, this almost mythic place where Babe Ruth had played on a barnstorming tour was kept locked tight.
One long ago July evening when the setting sun sent long, slanting shadows of the deserted stands slicing across the field, we broke in, struggling to climb over the locked gates. No wind moved the humid air, magnifying sounds so they took on an eerie transcendence. Someone had painted and cleaned the place, mowing the grass and even laying down bases as if for a game, giving the place a spooky feeling as we stood on home plate. Long before anyone had heard of Moonlight Graham and the Field of Dreams, a ghostly groundskeeper had mysteriously preserved this museum.
I drifted back to that moment this week when one evening I watched The Natural for the fifteenth time and then clicked the remote to see my local Twins lose because their once reliable relief pitching is having a tough time in a year Sports Illustrated jinxed them by picking the team to win their division (has anyone kept stats on how often SI has picked the wrong team, no matter what the sport?).
We nicknamed it “the national pastime,” this venerable institution, a little gray around the edges, whose values go back more than a century, perhaps even to the father of our country, who is said to have played a primitive version with the troops at Valley Forge. It is, as Roger Kahn has so perceptively observed, our only sport without a time clock, which means a game can go on as long as the forces of physics are held in abeyance. An at-bat can last a blink of an eye or dissolve into a seemingly interminable cat and mouse game of foul ball after foul ball, one coming so close to the foul pole that for a second it hangs between immortality and failure.
Baseball has always served as a weathervane indicating the direction the winds of change are coming from and how strong. We watch the changes the way players pay close attention to how air currents play with that fly ball hanging in the spotlights in straightaway center field. Babe Ruth will always personify the Roaring Twenties, his prodigious appetites and Brobdingnagian feats forever tied to the excesses of the Jazz Age. No sooner had the Democratic Party fought the battle of 1948, with Strom Thurmond stalking into history, than baseball went through a similar crisis with Jackie Robinson finally making it truly a sport for all Americans. Unfortunately the rest of the country did not always get the message, creating tragic scenes where players were not accepted by certain business establishments.
Then during what is now widely termed the Steroid Era baseball became something perverted by television, greedy owners and players into a spectacle some old-timers found hard to recognize. In an effort to recover an audience lost to football and basketball, teams tried a variety of gimmicks. Team schedules became crowded with so many giveaways and special days, that an ordinary game day became extraordinary.
The Steroid Era
Several years after, baseball reached rock bottom when the likes of Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire received subpoenas to testify before a Congressional committee investigating steroid use. That Congress chose not to question football with its offensive lines that can weigh close to a ton or basketball “power forwards” resembling Olympic weightlifters, offered a sad comment on baseball’s fall from grace. McGwire’s guarded testimony provided vivid evidence of baseball’s confusion and disarray.
So much of that Era of Bad Feelings seemed a conspiracy to deny good feelings, as the press and voices of vitriol fed on fallibility and doubt like metastasizing cancer cells. In this atmosphere where the air always seemed filled with the smoke of the latest flare-up, identity became a pressing issue as our neighborhoods and the places we worked and shopped devolved into interchangeable parts on some ghastly giant assembly line designed to produce androids.
Heroes proved especially vulnerable, perhaps because they carry more baggage than the rest of us-including carrying some of our own–as one after another fell under the burden. The Hall of Shame became so full that it appeared in need of an addition in anticipation of a bumper crop of inductees, their failings engraved on tell-all bestsellers or a Beyond the Glory exposé.
So baseball, that weather vane of the American character, registered those stormy times, with gusts blowing in strongly from the outfield and dark clouds threatening a rain out on the horizon. Baseball was brushed back, knocked to its knees and many were sure it would never get up again.
It had already become disdained by television audiences and advertisers because its timelessness seemed foreign in hyperdriven times–times when there was money to be made in derivatives, subprime mortgages and other financial shenanigans. Most tellingly baseball traditionalists refused to compromise the game with concessions to sponsors that football and basketball had made with two-minute “warnings” and television timeouts.
Baseball, with its rules, traditions, and lack of violence, also fell victim to the largest-growing area of so-called sports entertainment–pseudo sports such as professional wrestling, something called ultimate fighting and various “extreme” challenges such as snowboarding down the Matterhorn. That these sports seemed deliberately outlandish and violent should not have surprised anyone living in the Era of Bad Feelings, for many represent scripted exercises with growling opponents trash talking and throwing garbage at each other. Perhaps this entertainment provided a welcome diversion from people on Wall Street engaging in similar activities.
The Box Office
In those times baseball came to reflect America in other ways. When the New York Yankees signed the free agent who by consensus is the game’s best all-around player, Alex Rodriguez, giving him a contract that came close to the combined salaries of entire teams, it exposed once again America’s dirty little secret. Baseball mirrored America, but few wanted to look at the image staring back at them. You could buy a World Championship just like you bought and sold once proud corporate names and their employees. You could do this because the rapidly growing gap between baseball’s rich and poor teams reflected America’s own growing income disparities.
The symbol of this was the rush to build new stadiums during the Steroid Era. Virtually every major league team held its home city for ransom in high stakes games whose bottom line was build me a stadium or we will leave. The main reason they needed those new stadiums was to segregate the millionaires from the rest of us.
Back in the day, as my son says, the high rollers used to sit in box seats that were placed in choice locations nearest the field. But box seats did not keep off the rain or ward off the cold or prevent the average fan who had imbibed too many beers from shouting in their ears. People in those box seats actually had to share bathrooms with us. They also got their food just like the rest of us, from vendors roaming the aisles. These vendors did not sell Brie or wine or serve fancy little sandwiches or single-malt Scotch, so that poor blue-blood in the box seats drank Bud from a paper cup and ate hot dogs from paper wrappers.
Hence the luxury box. It is isolated high above the field where the sights, sounds and most important the smells never penetrate behind the thick glass windows. You probably all remember the climactic sequence in The Natural where a crooked gambler and scheming team owner ominously look out on the field from an early version of a luxury box as if they were Roman aristocrats at the Coliseum.
The luxury box became a fitting symbol for those out-of-control economic times, one in which the disparity between rich and poor ballooned to the largest it had been since the Gilded Age. The luxury box was the gated community, the dark-windowed limo, the penthouse office suite plopped into the house of the American pastime where it figuratively extended its middle finger to the rest of us.
It exposed the true feelings those people have for the average American. It said, I don’t want to see you, hear you, risk even bumping into you peasants. But there was contempt not only for the average fan but for the game itself.
Baseball has always been about sitting under the lights on a summer evening where you could actually smell the fresh-cut grass, feel the slight breeze that rippled the flags on the foul poles and hear the chatter of the infielders. It is about the unmistakable sound when the sweet spot of a hickory bat contacts the ball just right, sucking the very air out of the stands as people rise to follow its trajectory and then let it all out in an unbridled display of emotion where perfect strangers hug and high five in communion, held together by the electricity of thousands of minds all aligned in celebration.
Those in the suites do not know this. They may cheer and yell like everyone else, but the impact is like people in a living room watching a wide screen television. They are no-shows in the great democracy of the stands and they don’t want any part of it.
The Revival of Baseball
But the times have changed, as they always do. It is perhaps no coincidence that baseball is enjoying a revival in the midst of the current recession. The same thing happened in the 1930s, which many still regard as the game’s greatest decade. Despite rising ticket prices, pampered superstars and those luxury boxes being paid for by local taxes, fans are crowding the ball parks in record numbers.
It was a commercial–of all things–that singled the change to me–you know that series with the Miller High Life delivery guy. It was a telling moment in our nation’s consciousness when this black man took away the Miller bottles from a bunch of Wall Street types in one of those luxury boxes. That was right about the time Barack Obama was making his run to the White House.
There is something in the revival of baseball that promises hope even in these critical times, for if baseball can recover from the Steroid Era, then maybe America can also recover from the economic equivalent. That is what took me back to that long ago evening when we broke into that abandoned field and also why The Natural resonated yet again, for our defiant act and the theme of that movie are both about not letting money-ball run the game.
I have not been to a game yet this year–those baseball seats are notoriously hard on me–but my son and his wife have, fittingly to the Orioles park which has been heralded as a return to the old baseball, no artificial turf, no dome, but baseball as it was when I was growing up. The two of them also took part in a ritual as old as the game, gradually moving to better seats as the die-hard fans left the game. That gives me optimism that maybe all of us can enjoy that same ritual.
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