Baseball is America's Favorite Pastime

America's Pastime: The Importance of Baseball to United States Life and Culture: in Film, Society, and in Everyday Life That now timeworn clich?, 'baseball is as American as apple pie' may in fact nowadays ring (and actually be) less true than in past years; notwithstanding the views (of perhaps especially) diehard baseball enthusiasts. The strongest reason may be that in 21st century America; 'apple pie', literally and metaphorically, has become today no more (nor any less) 'American' than a sushi roll; stuffed calzone or Macho Burrito. Such changes notwithstanding, I will explore how the long held national sense of baseball as 'America's pastime' first came to be, and how and why this sense of baseball remains strongly with us today. Also, I shall describe how combined, implied social and political importances of baseball, to the American psyche and realization of the "American Dream" is powerfully and vividly reflected in films like The Rookie; Field of Dreams, and A League of their Own. Baseball, while more popular in America than ever (or anywhere else, with the possible exception of Japan) nevertheless has a much stronger international flavor now than yesterday, especially in terms of the diversity of now billions of fans, players, and others actively or passively involved, or both. Moreover, scandals, especially many having to do with alleged abuse of steroids by many of today's baseball standouts (and others), have unfortunately now sullied some of baseball's long-held reputation for integrity and fair play: important American standards and values (Macauley, "Drugs in Sports"). Still, even in today's complex; culturally-fragmented sports and entertainment worlds (these overlapping media-driven universes also include sports once considered too "foreign" for American tastes: e.g., soccer; ice hockey), America baseball remains perhaps the best-loved and definitely the longest and most deeply-loved 'American pastime. Baseball in real life and movies about baseball alike say a lot about us. Organized baseball has been around in America since as long ago as 1845 ("History of Baseball"), but baseball itself as subject and/or object of many popular, sometimes even blockbuster American films is, on the other hand, a relatively new phenomenon of mostly the later 20th and early 21st centuries. According to the article "History of Baseball": The first team to play baseball under modern rules were the New York Knickerbockers. The club was founded on September 23, 1845, as a social club for the upper middle classes of New York City, and was strictly amateur until its disbandment. The club members, led by Alexander Cartwright, formulated the "Knickerbocker [sic] Rules", which in large part deal with organizational matters but which also lay out rules for playing the game. This, although American baseball is far from being this way today, it actually started as an elite pastime for the privileged few. According to the article "Baseball" (Wikipedia, 30 July 2007), an important part of the general background of what America now calls baseball, the sport known popularly as "America's pastime" is that: The modern version of the game developed in North America beginning in the eighteenth century. The consensus of historians is that it evolved from earlier bat-and-ball games, such as rounders, brought to the continent by British and Irish immigrants. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball in contrast to the very similar game of softball. Perhaps this is because, like America itself even since pre- Massachusetts Bay Colony times; when 'free spirits' like Captain John Smith built from scratch new lives of opportunity, we have been a nation within which so many have been able to 'pull themselves up by the bootstraps' and succeed in life in a whole new way - often far beyond expectations. Baseball players typically embody this dream and fundamental spirit of America, Traditionally-speaking, in America anyone, with raw talent, hard work, practice, perseverance, optimism and patience combined [among these, only the raw talent part cannot be acquired, with effort] can rise in baseball: possibly (if still rarely) to megastar status like Babe Ruth; Lou Gehrig; Mickey Mantle; Jackie Robinson; Hank Greenberg; Joe DiMaggio and other more recent baseball legends. Those names alone, either on an individual basis or within a group, alone offer another importance inference to be gleaned, into why baseball is and always has been considered deeply, fundamentally American. Notwithstanding the fact that America, historically and presently, prides itself on being a 'melting pot'; and on individuals' and groups within America's having long embraced, and benefited from, the 'melting pot' concept; the United States has, nevertheless always been (think of American slave times, in which black Southern American slaves were Constitutionally considered, for census purposes, to each be just 3/5 of a person) a place where ethnic; racial; cultural; religious and economic prejudices run deep. Within such a long-term national environment of mostly-unthinking, knee-jerk white Anglo exclusivity in baseball, exclusivity, though; baseball has long been one (and for quite a while, even, the only one) of the very few ways of someone who is 'nobody in particular' and comes from just an average family, or a poor one, still possibly making it big, whoever you are; whoever your parents are or were. Whichever 'side of the tracks' your family lives on, if you are a skilled enough player, work hard, practice a lot, and don't give up, you can, with enough perseverance and practice, someday perhaps be on the pitcher's mound at Yankee Stadium, looking out at millions. And, while clearly many of baseball's super-greats have been of Anglo- heritage, baseball has also (even if reluctantly at first) eventually opened its arms to blacks (e.g., Jackie Robinson, the first-ever African- American Major League player; Hank Greenberg (see The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg) the first-ever Jewish major leaguer. Both of these baseball "firsts", which represented enormous breakthroughs for those two players and, much more broadly, baseball itself as an ever-American sport, happened at around the same time in modern American history: just before the worst fighting of World War II, when America was being sharply reminded daily by overseas casualties of the key importance of national solidarity and unity. It is perhaps too much to claim that baseball 'led the way' toward greater, more open ethnic and other tolerances of one another. But if it was not quite that, baseball, like no other sport, functioned in a way that allowed us all to see and enjoy, very positively and proudly, not just our great players from all backgrounds, but our own greater national inclusiveness. It is in such ways that baseball has often functioned, and still does, as a sort of national mirror of our best (and, in more recent times, with alleged steroid abuse, our possible worst) selves. But before professional baseball's widespread steroid scandals that began in the 1990's, rocking the baseball world like never before and that persist to this day, players from Mexico; Puerto Rico; Latin America; Europe; Asia; Australia and Africa and/or of those and many other backgrounds found themselves, beginning especially in the 1970's, newly welcomed into professional major and minor league teams. Baseball's billions of fans throughout America (and, increasingly, the world) now and always have come from all walks of life. While not all Americans are enthusiasts or even fans; most Americans have been personally touched in some way by this sport. Most typically this would be through playing and/or watching, If not that, it may have been from seeing a baseball movie; or seeing on TV, a great baseball player's inspiring biography, like Lou Gehrig's. Another 'American' characteristic of this sport is that it is accessible. Usually even the poorest American neighborhoods have a few balls, bats, and old gloves. One can't ski, ice skate, golf or play hockey without special and usually expensive gear; but baseball equipment is simpler and relatively cheap compared to most other team sports. Further, just about anyone of any age can play:kids of all ages; their physically- fit (or not-so-fit) parents; grandparents; even people with artificial limbs. This echoes the inclusiveness first encouraged among even the earliest Americans, by John Winthrop; Simon Bradstreet, and other early leaders. Baseball also frequently gives multigenerational families and diverse groups the bond of a shared interest and pastime. As America continues, even if unintentionally, to grow into an ever lonelier, more impersonal place, baseball still draws people together for a shared American experience, be it in living rooms; bars, or stadiums. Especially within the past few decades, moreover; popular mainstream movies with strong, uplifting baseball themes have grown into yet another way of sustaining and increasing American enthusiasm for baseball. The sport itself and movies about individual players and/or teams clearly helps to underscore the positive spirit of baseball, and perhaps America itself, upon whose own national spirit the sport was established. In the movies as in real life, moreover; it is never too late to play baseball for fun or even - albeit rarely - for the major leagues! For instance, in the popular Disney movie The Rookie (2002, with Dennis Quaid and Rachel Griffiths) the 'back story', of the film is that middle-aged Jimmy Morris, currently a successful high school football coach in Texas and married with a teenage daughter, lives a productive, content but not deeply fulfilling life. In his youth, Jimmy had missed becoming a pro pitcher because of a shoulder injury. Now Jimmy receives a rare second change to perhaps live his youthful dream after all, in midlife, a time when, realistically speaking (at least for the vast majority of would-be baseball professionals) anyone not making it long before this has simply missed his chance. Jimmy Morris's late-life professional baseball story is true (with a few Hollywood add-ons); put perhaps more importantly than that, it rings true - probably within the collective American psyche in particular. After all, very occasionally in America (and in baseball, two near-synonymous entities in our culture) unusual exceptions to the rules, or to the long- held norms and averages of life do occur. Such special and singular occurrences, moreover, are plausible entirely plausible to our psyche. We need not suspend disbelief. We need not disbelieve at all. That is the real emotional power, for Americans, of a movie like The Rookie. The continuing hold of baseball on our national imagination is powerfully similar if more diffused. In American popular culture and by world reputation alike, the United States is still supposedly the place on earth where something impossibly; uniquely, and most of all personally special can happen for anyone. Anyone truly trying long and hard enough and making the right decisions, moves, and sacrifices along the way can grow up to be great - in sports; in entertainment, in science or something else. Everyone, as the conventional wisdom goes, is unique, special, potentially entirely self-actualizing and fulfilled. This fulfillment of a personal dream can and does happen anytime; anywhere - at a young age; at an older age, and once in awhile (even in professional sports) at an age when one is really too old for it to happen at all as the movie The Rookie well illustrates. That 'possibility of the impossible' is arguably the American Dream in operation, and an operation of a most personally and nationally reassuring kind. Therefore the idea of someone like Jimmy Morris, a pleasant, seemingly mostly average guy living life responsibly in middle-America, and who was unlucky when a big break came his way at the wrong time as a younger man, getting a second chance at the pros, anyway is enormously appealing - not just for diehard wannabees whom might (still; somehow) love to be Jimmy- but because the whole idea that it is never too late to actualize one's dream implies hope of other unexpected new chances for others as well. Therefore, should lightening somehow strike twice, one could grab that elusive gold ring this time around. The Rookie's ultimately upbeat; energizing; inspiring message, and especially the movie's central point that it is never really too late to live one's dream, likely means many things to many people - mostly having nothing to do with baseball. What the movie' does spawn (or perhaps spawn again), deeply within the American soul is something broader and more universal, as well as personal for each individual movie-goer (baseball fan or not): i.e., 'I can still make it; after all, it is not yet too late.' There lingers the possibility of a long-cherished goal still being reached, even against steeper odds than before. One's special talents and uniqueness could still be ferreted out by fate. But in America one must also be someone worthy of her, or his second chance, and worthy in the American sense of that word. What that means is that one must work as hard, or harder after life's cruel disappointments as one had worked before them. One must be responsible, not self-pitying or self-indulgent. One must get on with life as it is now and be there for other people. One must not be obsessed with the past; however much sweeter it may have felt than does one's disappointingly ordinary life today. Within The Rookie, then, Jimmy Morris fully deserves his unique second chance because he does, and is, all of that and more. Jimmy is a good man who has always deserved that second chance, even if he truly does not hope for it anymore. That whole idea, though, of special second chances for special and rare individuals, based on their having lived lives that cause them to be deserving of it, likely carries a great deal more weight of truth (and indeed, genuine plausibility) in a place like America than in most other places. The Rookie is symbolically the story of a once near professional player rising against all odds from the still-living ashes of his long-cherished dream. And - in addition to all of that -Jimmy Morris's story as conveyed within The Rookie, with some Hollywood twists and tweaks, really is for the most part true. The Rookie first hit theaters in 2002 and was tremendously popular with audiences from the start. Most baseball movies draw good audience share in America, e.g., Bull Durham; Major League; The Natural; even the now-decades-old Bad News Bears is still usually already checked out from the local Blockbuster. The movie A League of their Own (1992), one that this time features a team of early professional female baseball players (this is another true baseball story of grit, determination, and persevering against the odds) and the obstacles and external (and internal) conflicts they faced and eventually prevailed against, in pursuit of a shared dream, Women and professional baseball have not all that often, especially historically speaking, been seen in combination with one another, either in movies of in real life (unless the women wives; girlfriends, blood relatives or fans of male players). However, the inspiring film A League of their Own (1992, Penny Marshall, Dir.) is based on "true-to-life events, struggles, and triumphs of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL)" ("A League of their Own"). This popular baseball movie, starring women this time, in a WWII setting, offers an interesting and edifying exception to that general tendency of baseball. It is based on the real-life story of a group of young woman playing professional baseball when women rarely participated in professional team sports. Like Jimmy Morris in The Rookie, these are talented players of exceptional fortitude, who must fight down some personal demons along the way as they play ball, and help teammates do so as well. Clearly, this is a movie with a distinctly feminist tone to it, made in 1992 -a time the feminist movement in America, having been strongest in the 1970's and early 1980's, had been petering out for awhile. Woman director Penny Marshall implicitly suggests in various ways throughout this film (e.g., as each young woman recruited, all around the country, for candy-making business genius Walter Harvey's all-girl wartime exhibition baseball team (designed to make money for the war effort) struggles with deep-seated individual, family, and gender issues, externally and internally motivated at once, while doing her best to rise to the occasion(s) of being a baseball professional; a help to the team, and a person who can learn to like and respect herself and love others as well. All of the teammates ("the Peaches") must struggle, together as a group but more often then that, each on her own, toward athletic excellence, and mature self-hood, at a time when it is extremely difficult for women, much less competitive women athletes with good looks besides, to be taken seriously and treated with respect. that the issue and the struggles of (at the time this movie is set) mothers and grandmothers of 1992 theater audiences had endured many of the gender struggles (e.g., being discounted; underestimated; trivialized, or seen as an object instead of as a full, equal person)of 1992 that struggle, individually and together, to defy the odds of success in their sport in order to realize their dream. These women are recruited in order to form their own professional baseball team, a baseball first in America, back at a time when even the idea of women playing baseball, much less in a real professional league (as women do without the least pause or difficulty now) was mostly laughed at and underestimated. Unlike male baseball recruits at their same level, members of the peaches had to prove their skills and competitiveness again and again in public. Even then, there were various scenes in which even their proven abilities were then used against them, as a way of undermining their already shaky feeling of self worth, anyway. The various team members of the Peaches were, in real-life and on the playing field; professionally competitive and often also engaged (or embroiled) in personally very trying, emotionally upsetting situations, as often vividly of starkly shown in A League of their Own. In real life though (and on the field) these World War Ii-era female baseball professionals were in fact the very women, back in the 1940's when professional baseball was still strictly considered a sport acceptable only for men to play professionally, bravely blazed the original for future generations of female baseball professionals and women athletes in all sports today and tomorrow. In the process of proving and keeping their right to play and compete professionally, the group of female players forms a close cohesive bond. The team members help each other through tough times, and ultimately prevail over obstacles in their way, singly and together. This movie provides a great message for women (and everyone), but for women especially because many girls and women even today still tend to miss out of the character and strength-building experiences of working in teams while playing sports. Many of the most moving and powerful scenes within A League of one's Own suggest implicitly to the audience, by showing how these talented but sometimes both personally and athletically insecure athletes keep needing to iron out sibling rivalries (between the more talented Dottie and her less skilled but more determined younger sister Kit) and other interpersonal or just internal demons - all the while still playing the best they can. As this film convincingly conveys, especially through its portrayals of the various ups and downs, but ultimately the cohesive teamwork and shared integrity among the Peaches themselves, that playing baseball one's very best, whatever one's gender, can and does bring out the best in oneself and others. The teammates each grow stronger, wiser and more determined and confident through their struggles to be self-actualizing through baseball which for women back then was indeed to achieve the near impossible . In this movie then, we are powerfully reminded through the brave pioneering efforts of these early professional female players in the face of obstacles; that reaching one's personal and professional goals, woman or man, can only really be stopped by abandoning one's self. Baseball-centered movies are never about quitters, and in affirming, uplifting movies like A League of their Own the positive message, an American one based on our national independence-fused; and optimistic national spirit, this time including that of women players, is that with teamwork, determination, heart and perseverance, anyone who really wants to master a skill, and oneself, enough indeed can.. Further, as the article "A League of their Own states, "Many of the older women shown in the final scenes had been actual players of the AAGPBL." Perhaps the most popular and powerfully moving, indeed the most unforgettable, of the three baseball movies analyzed here is Field of Dreams (1989, with Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan). This is in fact a movie less about the enigmatic Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose mysterious unseen persona nevertheless drives the plot and action of the main character Ray Kinchella, really, than about the man who idolizes the ever-mysterious idea of him and therefore builds a baseball 'Field of Dreams' on the cornfield of his Iowa farm, convinced Shoeless Joe will come there. All of this strangeness begins on a usual evening, at around dusk, when Ray is out in his field tending the corn, or trying his best to do so. Then, from somewhere deep within the corn, Ray hears a disembodied voice that tells him in an enigmatic whisper: "If you build it, he will come" (Field of Dreams, 1989). No one in his family can ever hear this voice when it speaks to him, and when Ray asks some of the other corn farmers in the area to come and try to hear it at the same time Ray does, they beginning to think he might have become suddenly mentally disturbed. Moreover, Ray worries about this himself and in awhile so does his wife. Then on another day, still feeling worried and disturbed, Ray both hears the voice in the corn and sees in the sky above him an image of a baseball field having replaced his cornfield, with Shoeless Joe Jackson somehow standing inside the baseball field. In the 1920's (in real life, Shoeless Joe had been suspended from baseball. Shoeless Joe is now long dead, but Ray somehow knows that he now must tear up his profitable corn field and instead build a baseball diamond there so that Shoeless Joe will come back from the dead to play there. Ray knows, somehow, that if he does this, "Jackson will come back from the dead and be able to play again" ("Field of Dreams"). Ray takes a great financial risk in building the field, cut he feels compelled somehow to follow the mysterious voices and visions he keeps seeing, and his own impulses. Following his hunches and feelings, allowing himself to be spontaneous in this odd series of endeavors so as not to repeat his father's life, he finds himself, inexplicably, at Fenway Park with a sort of J.D. Salinger [author of The Catcher in the Rye] type author, then in Minnesota trying to track down an old man who was briefly a pro, for about five minutes, but never got to bat. Traveling back home to Iowa still accompanied by the reclusive writer Terence Mann (who alone hears some of the voices and sees some of the visions, the ones at Fenway park, they pick up a hitchhiker, a young incarnation of the now long- deceased country doctor Archie graham, the man now dead he and Mann had sought out without success in Minnesota, since Archie had died in the 1970's, without ever in his life getting to bat. On Ray's cornfield-turned baseball field, many dreams of many men, some of them alive, some long dead, but most importantly Ray's own dream of doing "something spontaneous" (following his feelings) begins to intersect metaphysically. Physically, meanwhile, just as Ray is about to lose is farm to bankruptcy, lines of cars begin now to stream toward Ray's baseball field, as the mysterious voice from somewhere within the corn crop had first promised. All three of these baseball movies, contain, albeit differently from one another, the similar subtexts of baseball's providing the initial conditions or possibility for one (in The Rookie) or more (in League of their Own and Field of Dreams) individuals to complete their own and/or another's unfinished business, through doing something risky and difficult having to do with baseball. All three of these films essential themes reflect, and underscore, what is best about baseball and America combined: how faith in oneself and others, against all odds, combines magically, when one only lets it, with infinite possibility. This also is how baseball, the only real constant throughout all of American life and history, sustains the American Dream. As Terrence Mann, the enigmatic writer tells Ray, in Field of Dreams, as he and Ray sit together watching a game at Fenway Park: The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come. As Mann has correctly predicted (shortly before his own death within the rustling corn stalks of Ray's 'Field of Dreams' itself), people from all over do begin coming to Ray's mysterious baseball field in the middle of nowhere. After all, out here, even the long-dead and forgotten of baseball history and lore somehow show back up - for yet another chance at realizing dreams long-deferred yet somehow, perhaps even inexorably, still alive.