Geography of an American pastime

As the world focuses on the US presidential election, Americans focus on the World Series, the best-of-seven game competition to determine the champions of Major League Baseball.

To European ears it’s always smacked of arrogance. How can a “world series” be contested among teams entirely drawn from one country – the USA (plus Montreal and Toronto)? Football, rugby, cricket all boast “world cups” where nations and continents grapple for global supremacy. This week’s World Series is being fought out between the Boston Red Sox and the St Louis Cardinals.

Back in 1951, a player named Bobby Thompson hit a dramatic home run to win the league championship for the New York Giants. Generations of American baseball fans have come to know it as “the shot heard round the world”, though it was heard nowhere outside north America.

A propensity to aggrandize the national sporting culture is not uniquely American (what the world knows as the English FA still refers to itself as the FA). Nonetheless, under present circumstances, “world series” is bound to seem symptomatic of a dangerously solipsistic popular consciousness.

US sports fans are for the most part blissfully unself-conscious about the moniker. In fact, given the babble about “American values” and “the American way of life” that accompanies election campaigns, it’s amazing how unaware most Americans are of the features of their society that are distinctive and exceptional. And one of these is its sporting culture.

Where other staples of American popular culture – music, movies, sitcoms, cartoons, fashions – have proved hugely successful cultural exports, American sport has enjoyed much more limited overseas appeal. By and large the games which arouse most passion among Americans are of little interest to other peoples, and vice versa.

Baseball does enjoy a mass following in Japan and Latin America, not least in Cuba, the US’s arch-adversary. Nonetheless, the baseball cap has travelled much further afield than the game itself.

Revealingly, the game’s global pretensions go hand in hand with its cherished role as a bearer of American national identity. “It’s our game, that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game,” Walt Whitman declared. “It has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere – belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitution and laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life” Which is more or less what Thomas Hughes said about cricket, Magna Carta and Britain in Tom Brown’s School Days.

As an institution, baseball illustrates one of American nationalism’s distinctive characteristics: the identification of the universal with the American, an identification rooted in the belief that America is not one nation state among many but the unique embodiment of an idea. A legacy of the European enlightenment but also a mask for empire-building (just as similar assumptions served the British in the heyday of their empire).

US sports culture is singular in other respects: in the importance attached to cheerleaders, in the systematic exploitation of higher education as a nursery for professional sport, in the singing of the national anthem before every sporting contest, no matter how parochial, and in the degree to which teams are playthings of private owners. Back in the 50s, New Yorkers were traumatised by the departure of the Giants and the Dodgers to California . It’s recently been confirmed that the Montreal Expos will move to Washington DC, whose previous ball clubs decamped decades ago to Minnesota and Texas.

Baseball enjoys its remarkable freedom of movement partly thanks to the special protection it receives from the state (in which respect it is typical of US capitalism as a whole). The “world series” itself was launched in 1903 as part of a deal which brought together the hitherto warring American and National Leagues, turned major league baseball into a cartel and reduced the players to serfs, barred from selling their labour to the highest bidder.

The game’s anomalous position as a privately owned public monopoly was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1922 – which ruled that baseball was exempt from antitrust legislation, a status it still largely enjoys. In 1975 the players’ union at last secured free agent status for its members, whose salaries have increased exponentially since then. The union has repeatedly resorted to the strike weapon and showed a commendable resistance to sentimentality in its willingness to close down the national pastime. As a result it can claim to be the world’s most successful (if also exclusive) trade union, with members’ average annual wage now 2.5 million dollars.

Baseball, like other games, has been mercilessly exploited by both nationalist demagogues and predatory businessmen. Indeed, it’s an illuminating example of how the two are intertwined. But that shouldn’t dull anyone’s enjoyment of one of world sport’s most entrancing spectacles. On top of being the main justification for the existence of Channel Five, baseball is a beguiling blend of ferocious individualism and collective coordination. It’s episodic, cerebral, unpredictable, bristling with traditions and blessed with a poetically absurd jargon. And in the end, like all games, it’s the property of no single culture. Just ask the Cubans.

[An edited version of this article appeared in The Guardian, 27 October]