Major League Baseball and Myth Making: Roland Barthes's Semiology and the Maintenance of Image

Introduction

It was found in a dusty trunk in a farmhouse attic in Fly Creek, New York, three miles from Cooperstown. It was "undersized, misshapen and obviously homemade" and unlike any other of its kind.¹ It became known as the "Doubleday Baseball" and was used by a historic commission to cement the game into the national psyche. The object became a symbol of an adventurous and independent United States, a country that, despite its regional differences, used baseball to forge and sustain an identity in the chaotic years surrounding the Civil War. The ball supposedly served as evidence that Abner Doubleday converted the multiversioned game of "town ball" into a contest that would eventually be called baseball.

By itself the Doubleday Baseball was a ball of cloth, whose stitched cover had been torn open. But when Cooperstown resident and philanthropist Stephen C. Clark purchased the ball in 1934, he vested it with a meaning that would tie into the findings of the Mills Commission almost twenty-five years earlier. The ball became more than a historical object. The ball came to embody the belief that the United States "owned" baseball inasmuch as the sport was rooted in American ideals and was the product of American enlightenment.

The Doubelday Baseball, supposedly one of the sport's earliest artifacts, serves as a case study for an object endowed with sincere meaning that can be taken for granted as part of U.S. history, much as its namesake was. This vestment is a process—one that fascinated French philosopher Roland Barthes, and he called the outcome of the process "myth" or "mythic speech." If one looks at the history of baseball, and later Major League Baseball, using Barthes's concept of mythic speech, the Doubleday Baseball serves to anchor an ethnocentric message, maintained in various forms by the administration of professional baseball leagues, most notably the Major Leagues.

Roland Barthes and Semiology

According to Barthes, images and visual representations—along with other objects—are symbols that provide underlying and socially based meanings and messages. Barthes states that objects are "signifiers" and embody or represent some idea or ideology. He calls that meaning the "signified." Together the signifier and signified constitute a third entity, called the "sign," in which the object and meaning are fused together and cannot be stripped from each other. But the sign can also represent or be part of an overarching ideology or set of sociocultural beliefs and thus serve as a signifier in a second order of meaning. Barthes calls this overarching set of ideas (or the signified in the second order of meaning) the "concept." Together the second-order signifier (which Barthes calls "form") and signified (or the "concept") comprise the "signification."² In other words, the form, or language, acts as a vessel carrying a message. As such, the two cannot be separated and form the third entity of signification, which may be transformed into myth. Barthes uses as an example a French magazine cover that depicts a black soldier saluting a French flag.³ The cover, as the signifier, uses the image to convey the message, or the signified. The message on the surface (at the level of the first order) is simply one of the black soldier saluting a flag. In the context of French culture and society, this sign conveys a larger, second-order meaning. That meaning becomes the concept, conveying the glorification of French imperialism and the suggestion that all of France's subjects, "without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors."⁴ The magazine cover then becomes a form that carries a concept, and the signification is one that bolsters French imperialism. Together the form, concept, and signification comprise myth. And myth is a primary focus in the study of semiology. It is myth, Barthes argues, that provides meaning to cultural objects and artifacts.

Barthes used semiology (also called semiotics) to...