A People's History of Baseball

5 "Wait 'Til Next Year" and the Denial of History

5 “WAIT ’TIL NEXT YEAR” AND THE DENIAL OF HISTORY The collective ethos represented by groups such as the Players Association , among others, may have been gaining popular support by the mid to late 1960s but it was threatened from the outset by another American ethos, one that had more deeply entrenched roots dating back well into the nineteenth century, that itself felt threatened by the collective movement. This ethos—the individualistic, “positive thinking” movement—rejected out of hand the critical, often grim portrait of America drawn by the collectivists and chose instead, as it had for decades, to embrace an unadulterated optimistic worldview that depended upon the willful ignorance of the types of inconvenient facts often highlighted by the collectivists in their quest to bring about social change. The clash of these competing visions of American life would result in the culture wars that have dominated the national landscape ever since and led a majority of Americans to turn against the civil rights, student, and Players Association movements to embrace the sunnier outlook of the positive thinkers, siding instead with people and views that were otherwise in many ways contrary and detrimental to their own self-interests. In the end, the pull of the well- entrenched “positive thinking” ethos was so strong and well-embedded in the American consciousness that the natural alliances between most Americans and groups such as the Players Association became lost in the haze of “pro-American” rhetoric, causing the Players Association to lose in the court of public opinion despite winning at the bargaining table. THE AMERICAN UNDERDOG DELUSION The positive thinking movement reveals itself most tellingly in the causes underlying the nature of American support for the underdog, which is nowhere embedded more deeply than in our national pastime. There is perhaps nothing more American than rooting for the underdog . As much as any other single trait, it defines us as a nation. And we know we root for underdogs because we keep saying that we do. As sociologist Edward Sagarin observed: “Historians and social commentators repeat it, and then one goes to the sports arena and hears the cheering of the tumultuous crowd, as the brave and small Battling Joe, with the odds three to one against him and no takers in sight, comes from behind, and begins to knock the champ right out of the ring. The pandemonium is contagious, and everyone joins in the enthusiastic encouragement . . .”1 In such an environment, there are hardly any in the crowd who “cannot help but express their admiration for the man who came from behind.”2 As for why Americans identify so heavily with the underdog, psychologists have surmised that rooting for the underdog correlates with the American values of hard work, struggle, risk taking, and courage. In the words of one, “to overcome odds is the great American dream.”3 Of course, being our national pastime, it was only natural that baseball embraced this value, which it has, practically from its inception. Indeed, much of the rhetoric of the baseball creed is directed toward societal underdogs —the disadvantaged, dispossessed strivers (such as those latenineteenth -century immigrants) hoping to one day knock out the champ themselves. In his satiric ode to the concept of baseball as America, The Great American Novel, Philip Roth captured the nation’s underdog spirit in a scene where one of his characters attempts to lift the mood of members of the sad-sack Ruppert Mundy’s baseball team, who felt shafted after being informed that, owing to a series of events beyond their control, “WAIT ’TIL NEXT YEAR” AND THE DENIAL OF HISTORY 147 their home field would be unavailable to them all season and they would therefore be condemned to play their entire schedule on the road: “Well, like Ulysses S. told you boys, that’s good for you that it ain’t fair. That’s gonna make champs out of you, if not in this here season, then in the next. Wait’ll next year, boys! . . . You want me to tell you boys somethin’? This bein’ homeless is just about the best thing that has ever happened to you, if you only had the sense to know it.”4 The inverse of the nation’s underdog obsession was expressed in Ernest Thayer’s “Casey At the Bat” wherein the obvious favorite, mighty Casey, struck out. It is likely the poem would not have become...