Conscious Choice: Poking holes in the national pastime

April 2003

Poking holes in the national pastime

Baseball Exhibit Begs Questions

by Jonn Salovaara

Do we still have a national pastime? Will organized sports play a role in the culture we’re all in the process of creating? What’s the best relationship between government and sports?

The Baseball As America exhibit, created by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York and currently hosted by the Field Museum, raises these questions but the answers go wanting. Yet, it does go beyond merely displaying the sacred relics of the game: the bat of Babe Ruth, the shoes of Shoeless Joe Jackson, the rarest of baseball cards, and nearly 500 other items.

Why would anyone be attracted to a display, even one as professionally designed as this, of old stadium bricks, baseballs, baseball cards, photographs, bats, shoes, and yes, even an old turn-style? The attraction can be explained in terms of invested emotions, according to Alaka Wali, director of the Field Museum’s Center for Cultural Understanding.

Wali suggests that parents and children share emotions as they watch games together or practice playing. In little league and school play, the agony of defeat and the thrill of victory are palpable. Kids love and hate — sometimes simultaneously — baseball heroes, from Mickey Mantle when I was a kid, to Sammy Sosa, my nine-year-old son’s sometimes idol. And fans, whether kids or adults, develop deep loyalties for a particular team, riding the hopes and disappointments of each baseball season. In all of this, baseball becomes a repository of half-remembered feelings. The items of memorabilia on display, some of them homely and worn when viewed objectively, may still summon squads of memories tinged with these emotions.

To be sure, our national government has tapped into all this. The "Star Spangled Banner" still plays at the start of major league games in the United States. But it’s not just the national anthem. Presidents from William Howard Taft to George W. Bush have thrown out the first ball of the season. In the exhibit, a video repeatedly plays part of the anthem and includes footage of presidential pitches; later we see Franklin D. Roosevelt’s letter stating that it’s important for baseball to continue during World War II. We also learn about Japanese Americans interned during that war, playing baseball in the camps, in part to pass the time, but also to demonstrate their continued allegiance to the United States, despite its crime against them. More recently, shortly after September 11, New York City police and firefighters stood side by side with ballplayers for the unfurling of a huge flag as major league baseball resumed play in an attempt to "get things back to normal."

The exhibit doesn’t really question the co-opting of baseball as a means of creating emotional attachment to the state. Is it legitimate or is it a form of brainwashing, since the merits and demerits of the country are blurred in a haze of sports emotion?

The exhibit documents the role of racism in the history of the game, reminding us about the initial inclusion and subsequent separation of African Americans and the eventual opening of major league baseball to blacks. One glass case displays the retired-number jersey of Jackie Robinson, the player who crossed the line between black and white teams in 1947. With it is a letter from John F. Kennedy to Robinson that epitomizes Robinson’s continued commitment to civil rights after his retirement from baseball and reminds us of his stature on the national scene. The exhibit acknowledges continuing racism in the game in the form of the Cleveland Indians and other teams whose names and mascots demean Native Americans.

So do we still have a national pastime? The Baseball Hall of Fame certainly wants the answer to be yes and it wants baseball to be that pastime. The exhibit’s labeling constantly uses "the national game" as a synonym for baseball. But even within baseball, increasing numbers of Asians and Latin Americans participate without losing their own national identity, be it Japanese or Dominican. The game is a developed sport in other countries beside the United States. Is this globalization of baseball significant?

Again, the exhibit notices the issue but doesn’t develop it. Similarly, the over-commercialization of baseball is noted but sidestepped with the platitude that the fan is the ultimate financier. Can the high price of everything from tickets to trinkets finally destroy the emotional connection? Or will the preference of kids and parents for youth soccer do that first? This last question is not even whispered.

Alaka Wali offers another way of looking at all these issues. Baseball, like many other human endeavors, is an aspect of our creativity. It is one way in which we create meaning for ourselves within our culture. And, she reminds us, "There’s a resiliency in culture; it is much more complicated than we think. If baseball dies here, it may survive somewhere else." Baseball, she notes, has evolved as a game through constant and creative innovation, both by players and officials.

The sport’s popularity may decline in relation to other sports such as soccer, or some other game unknown as yet, but the lessons of baseball in the last century serve to guide whatever takes its place. Those lessons point to the importance of inclusion, the treachery of commercial success, and the dubiousness of identification between sports and government.

Jonn Salovaara is a freelance writer and landscape gardener. He teaches writing and literature at Columbia College in Chicago.

Baseball as America at the Field Museum

Closes July 20, 2003

Exhibit tickets must be purchased in combination with a basic admission ticket. Combined price is $15 for adults, $10 for seniors and students with ID, $7 for children ages 3 to 11. 10:00 am to 5:00 pm daily. Call 312-922-9410 or visit www.fieldmuseum.org.

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