Baseball and Social Class: Essays on the Democratic Game That Isn’t ed. by Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey (review)

From Walt Whitman to A. G. Spalding to George Will, baseball has long been celebrated as the great national game which extolls the virtues of the American dream and social mobility. In this mythology, baseball, like the American society which it reflects, is a democratic meritocracy in which anyone may succeed through talent and hard work. The reality of both baseball and the American dream is more complicated with a history of racial, gender, ethnic, and class bias. This gap between rhetoric and reality is the subject of Baseball and Social Class edited by Ronald E. Kates and Warren Tormey, professors of English at Middle Tennessee State University. In his introduction to the volume, Kates asserts, “Collectively, the contributors explore the complicated class dynamics that have always existed within that great American sporting institution that has historically defined itself according to an egalitarian ethos of classlessness” (5).

The thirteen essays included in this collection are arranged chronologically and trace the theme of baseball and social class from the sport’s origins to the present day. Most of the essays included in the volume were originally presented at the Conference on Baseball in Literature and American Culture convened annually at Middle Tennessee State University. Accordingly, many of the pieces focus upon the rich genre of baseball literature as reflective of the social contradictions which have defined both baseball and the American dream.

In “Gothic Baseball: The Death of Mary Rogers and the ‘Birth’ of Baseball History,” Steve Andrews argues that while there is considerable debate regarding the “father” of baseball, there is little attention given to the role of women in the sport’s origins. Andrews suggests that Mary Rogers, a New York City working girl who was found murdered in 1841 (apparently from a botched abortion), is a likely candidate. The death of Rogers encouraged the formation of more rules and regulations to impose some order on the chaos of urban society in the 1840s. Thus, in 1846 a baseball game under the rules proposed by Alexander Cartwright was played at Hoboken’s Elysian Fields. The argument for Mary Rogers as the “mother” of baseball may strain credibility for some readers, but it is a good example of the provocative writing to be found in Baseball and Social Class. Baseball in the nineteenth century is also the subject of Janaka B. Lewis’s essay on how African Americans embraced the game. Lewis maintains that black baseball fit well with Booker T. Washington’s emphasis on social uplift. Jackie Robinson, Lewis concludes, was the product “of a long process of the sport’s integration, which developed out of a long held desire for recognition and respectability that came through competing on a national field” (38).

Almost half of the essays in the collection concentrate upon baseball in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Scott D. Peterson argues that the fiction of authors Charles Van Loan, Ring Lardner, and Bozeman Bulger in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post made baseball more acceptable to middle-class readers by emphasizing the values of discipline and hard work which athletes needed to succeed in baseball and America society. Moving away from the field of literature, Warren Tormey examines the career of Eddie Collins, whose college background and lucrative contract led the second baseman to avoid participation in the gambling scandal on the 1919 Chicago White Sox. Collins kept his mouth shut during the Black Sox scandal and later as general manager of the Boston Red Sox, when he failed to challenge the racial policies of owner Tom Yawkey. Tormey concludes that Collins “was no innovator, or decrier of massive injustice, nor agent of social transformation. Instead, he was a solidly middle class man of entrepreneurial bearing who knew how to flourish within the context of his times” (109). While sport was generally ignored by...