Baseball as the National Pastime

Baseball has captured the imagination of Americans for the past two centuries. The game has so mirrored the spirit, values, and psyche of the populace that upon visiting the United States, French historian Jacques Barzun once felt compelled to write: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” For purposes of this article, we will assume that Barzun’s observation is, or at least was, accurate. The far more intriguing question is: why is baseball America’s national pastime?

By the middle of the nineteenth century the children’s game that entailed striking a ball with a bat and running to bases had been converted into an organized activity for adults. Teams organized in large cities in the Northeast, structured around the trade guilds of the time, with the earliest newspaper accounts of baseball dating back to October 1845. By 1869, the public’s interest in the game had reached a sufficient level that the business community concluded that there was profit to be made in this previously amateur activity, and America’s first professional sports team was born, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Professional sports had reached American soil and there was no turning back. Americans began to see baseball as a reflection of society and delighted in aligning country and sport. Felled by the baseball “fever,” Mark Twain in 1889 felt compelled to write that baseball was “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming, nineteenth century.” As the nineteenth century came to a close, a convergence of factors propelled baseball into an exclusive status as the national game, or, as it quickly became known, the “National Pastime.”

The industrialization of the late 1800s and early 1900s forced America to confront the predictable pressures of a changing nation. As waves of immigrants came to America seeking a better life and, in the process, provided a ready workforce to man the machinery of the plants and factories, the urban centers in this country experienced a population explosion. The cities were bursting at the seams and the infrastructure struggled to keep up with the dramatic growth. Overcrowded slums were populated by newcomers with weak community ties. The factory jobs held by these immigrants, including women and children, were menial, hazardous, and low-paying. Corrupt urban politics that could take advantage of this new-found immigrant political base became rampant. Despite a booming economy bolstered by the availability of this cheap immigrant labor, the future appeared dangerous and particularly unsettling to the native white status quo, who were concerned about both their country and their culture.

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Progressivism developed as a movement to help alleviate these systemic domestic problems. The Progressives functioned as optimistic activists who believed that they could solve these domestic issues by identifying, studying, and understanding them. On the international front, with the increased wealth and prestige of an industrialized nation, the United States began to see itself as a world power, and, despite the growing internal social stratification, the country experienced a tremendous upsurge of nationalism.

What America needed was a mechanism for assimilating these “newcomers” and acculturating them, so that they would adopt and reflect the existing values and mores of American society. There, poised and ready, stood baseball. The public was already wildly embracing the game. Attendance at major league games skyrocketed during the first decade of the twentieth century from 1.8 million fans in 1900 to 6.6 million fans in 1909. This explosion in interest and attendance is largely attributable to the urbanization that increased the number of potential fans, the increased economic prosperity that put more money in the hands of these fans, the improved transportation that made the ballparks more accessible, and the improved communication (most particularly the newspapers) that could rapidly spread the message of baseball to the masses.

Clearly, the excitement of the game itself, the presence of notable citizens and dignitaries in the ballpark, the increased newspaper coverage, and the introduction of sports heroes into everyday life all added to the aura of baseball. The press seized upon this expanding public interest for economic purposes. The salaries of the sportswriters were based upon readership; therefore, the more important the game and its participants appeared, the more people would read the writer’s columns, and the bigger the author’s paycheck. Not surprisingly, the baseball writers began to depict the game as epic struggles with larger than life heroes as combatants. Accordingly, sportswriters and their papers quickly developed a symbiotic relationship with the game–the more coverage, the more fans; and the more fans, the more readers. It is little wonder that the press began to find ways to make the sport appear relevant, if not essential, to the ideology, values, and ethos of the largest segment of the fan base—Middle America.

Players were described as being courageous, hardworking, and selfless—willing to employ their skills and, where necessary, “sacrifice” for the good to the team. The game was depicted as a rational game, with established rules and accepted behavior, and all decisions regarding who, where, and when the ballplayers participated were made by a manager (management), not by the players (labor). The game largely mirrored the structure of the workplace and transmitted the values that management wished to impart to the workers, most particularly the newly-arrived immigrant workers. The baseball creed became one of egalitarianism and, at least theoretically, epitomized the American dream. Success was available to anyone with talent, who was prepared to follow the rules and work hard for the good of the whole. In light of major league baseball’s systematic exclusion of black baseball players until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, it is clear that for a significant segment of Americans the creed was myth. But this “democratic myth” served its purpose with a message that was abundantly clear if not fallacious–any young boy who wanted to be integrated into the American culture needed to play baseball. For those who could not actually participate in the sport, there was always the grandstand. The logical extension of what has been called the “integrative myth” was that similar to actually playing the game, those who watched the game likewise were exposed to and would ultimately adopt these American values. Thus, for player and fan alike, being a part of America’s game enabled them to fully understand what it was to be an American.

A similar myth also developed during this same period, which sought to address the concerns of the times. Although baseball as an organized sport began in the major cities of the Northeast, played by the various trade guilds and young professionals, the popularly-accepted story of the games roots was quite different. According to what has been labeled the “agrarian myth,” baseball purportedly was born and raised in the fields and pastures of rural America and was eventually transported to the big city. While historically inaccurate, the myth served an important function. As

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previously discussed, there was a growing concern among Middle Americans about the dramatic growth in the cities and the waves of immigrants, who not only did not necessarily share the same customs and traditions as middle-class Americans, but who often did not even speak the same language. Placing the origins of the game in the countryside was a nostalgic paean to an idealized, simpler time. The baseball terminology itself underscored this desire to create a pastoral beginning for the sport. The site of the contests were called “parks” or “fields” or “grounds,” and in these bucolic settings the outfield became known as the “pasture,” the infield had “paths,” and there in the middle was a “mound” where the “horsehide” was thrown. In short, the game was both a literal and a figurative oasis in the midst of Twain’s “raging, booming, tearing” America.

In addition to the impact of myth-making, two final factors likely contributed to baseball’s ability to establish itself as the national pastime: continuity of persons and continuity of place. While poets and pundits have made much of the inherent beauty of the game (a pastoral setting, time to visit between pitches, and no clock), clearly a large part of the appeal of the game to the masses was the players themselves. Beginning in 1903 with the signing of the National Agreement, the American League and the National League agreed to honor the player contracts of one another and in doing so eliminated the ability of players to “jump” leagues. Additionally, included within these player contracts was a provision that came to be known as the “reserve clause,” which effectively allowed the ball club to reserve the services of the player for as long as the team wished to employ that player. This clause withstood periodic legal challenges and remained in tact until baseball free agency arrived in 1975. Effectively, in tandem, the National Agreement and the Reserve Clause ensured that throughout the formative period and, ultimately, for over seventy years, because only the ball clubs could transfer players to other teams and cities, the ballplayers typically remained affiliated with a team for an extended period of time. This enabled fans to develop strong attachments to their favorite players and created a sense among the fans that at least to some degree this attachment was mutual. While the elimination of this clause has enabled these athletes to become more mobile and, in the process, richer, this increased mobility of player from team to team has also led to reduced continuity of personnel and thus to weaker fan affiliation with the ballplayers themselves.

Further, there was a continuity of place that contributed to the public’s allegiance to the team and, by extension, the sport itself. As part of the National Agreement, the owners agreed to “territoriality,” which established a protected domain for each team. Under this concept, the each owner agreed not to invade the turf of the other by moving new or existing teams into these areas. As a result of their agreement to jealously guard their geographic space, between 1903 and 1953 no major league baseball franchises changed cities. The result was that the fans of a particular team knew from year to year that their team would be there, as the “home” team truly was and seemingly for all time would remain the home team.

Ultimately, however, the ability of baseball to stake out its claim as the national pastime is, as Barzun had noted, a reflection of the “heart and mind [emphasis added]” of Americans. The desire of an individual to be liked or accepted by members of a group, as Solomon Asch has concluded, is one of the most powerful normative social influences that exists. For baseball, the explicit and implicit mantra became, “If you want to be an American (the group), you must learn baseball.” Using this as the basic framework for analysis, the story of baseball’s transformation from a children’s game to a national sport embraced by millions, is really an exercise in social psychology.

As previously noted, at the turn of the twentieth century, the physical, social, and psychic territory of middle-class Americans was being threatened by the “hordes” of newcomers. The response of the majority to this influx was a clear manifestation of the territorial imperative. In order to protect their financial and social gains, and with the desire for security or stability, the status quo used baseball to ensure that the waves of immigrants were first acculturated and, subsequently, assimilated into society. Baseball became the vehicle for the transmittal of those values and attitudes, such as adherence to rules and respect for authority, that the status quo felt best protected their territory.

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Similarly, the willingness, if not outright desire of these immigrant groups to be assimilated, likewise reflected a comparable desire for security and stability. Their response to the prevailing social influences consistently followed the conformity process identified by Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman: compliance, identification, and internalization. First, these newest Americans conformed publicly to the accepted behavior and values by playing or at least watching baseball, while still maintaining their existing beliefs privately. As respected leaders in their communities began to play and attend these games, and as ballplayers with similar ethnicity achieved celebrity status, the immigrants began to identify more closely with the game and to conform to its articulated value system. This eventually led to the immigrants internalizing these values, as they conformed both publicly and privately to the espoused beliefs and accepted behavior articulated by the status quo through its primary mouthpieces—the schools, the church, and the press.

As a result of these motivations, manifestations, and social/psychological influences, baseball was indelibly etched into the psyche of the American public and thus became America’s sport—its National Pastime.

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