A People's History of Baseball

2 The Sovereign Nation of Baseball

2 THE SOVEREIGN NATION OF BASEBALL Having achieved the status they so longed for, the baseball “magnates” relished every opportunity afforded them to demonstrate the superiority of their game and, as a natural extension, themselves. As they were to discover , once they finally kicked the door down and established their game as a metaphor of America, there was seemingly no end to the institutions looking to glom on to them, much as they once tugged on the coattails of the WASP elites. All manner of establishments were eager to defer to baseball, to exalt it, to revel in the overt patriotism of the game as a way of either defining themselves or proving their nationalistic mettle. Throughout the twentieth century, among the game’s ardent cheerleaders were the federal judiciary and legislature, which, either through admiration or fear, repeatedly refused to challenge the superiority of baseball, much as they cowered from other powerful institutions. In time, the game (although not the players1 ) would become beholden to no one—a grim reality that, many decades hence, led to a seemingly inevitable debacle involving the game’s newly crowned all-time home run king where, through the illusion of baseball as subject to the rule of law, the reality of its independence from it was only confirmed once again.2 As far as the game was concerned, this was troubling enough; metaphorically speaking, the baseball debacle spoke of America here too, albeit this time of a nation miles removed from the sunny portrait painted by the baseball creed. THE ROOTS OF MLB’S EXTRALEGAL AUTHORITY Thanks to the hard work of the club owners and their attendant journalists , it was not long before the message of the baseball creed permeated the national culture so deeply that, by the era of the Black Sox scandal, a philosopher could express the sentiment of baseball as America without fear of serious rebuke: “I know full well that baseball is a boy’s game, and a professional sport, and that a properly cultured, serious person always feels like apologizing for attending a baseball game instead of a Strauss concert, or a lecture on the customs of the Fiji Islands. But I still maintain that, by all the canons of our modern books on comparative religions, baseball is a religion, and the only one that is not sectarian but national.”3 As the self-appointed caretakers of this national religion, the owners of Major League ball clubs were thus accorded a responsibility and therefore an authority higher than that of mere law. Pursuant to this hierarchy, and as became clear in the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal, the courts may have had the dirty job of keeping the masses in line but it was baseball that saw to it that they were inculcated with the appropriate American values.4 Of course, that the baseball creed was little more than a cultural fiction (there has always been a substantial disparity between the ideology of the game and its realities) was irrelevant. The entrepreneurs who founded the National League did not, after all, prevent gambling, game fixing, and the other vices that existed beforehand. Regardless, the ideology impacted how people viewed the game—it was of little matter that the creed was sheer fantasy. By the second decade of the twentieth century, however, the disparities between the myth and reality of the game were exposed to the extent that the creed was jeopardized. The revelation of this disparity tested the metaphor of baseball as America and, ironically, resulted in an even more greatly elevated status of the game within American society. For a while at least, despite the owners’ inability to rid the game of gambling and gossip of game fixing, the cultural fiction of the baseball THE SOVEREIGN NATION OF BASEBALL 29 creed remained dominant as rumors of impropriety remained just that because of baseball’s hesitance to investigate them. And if it was hesitant to confront these rumors directly, it certainly was unwilling to turn to the law to investigate and potentially punish its players. Consequently, players of “doubtful loyalty” were tolerated and continued to play Major League ball from one year to the next out of fear that exposure would damage the creed irreparably, resulting in a loss of societal status for the “magnates” who owned the teams and who had appointed themselves the gatekeepers of America’s national image.5 Rather than...