Smart Ball: Marketing the Myth and Managing the Reality of Major League Baseball

THIRD BASE: BASEBALL AS A NEOCOLONIALIST: ABUSING POWER

70 THIRD BASE BASEBALL AS A NEOCOLONIALIST: ABUSING POWER While the racial environment in sport may be improving, it seems like it is worsening in society at large. —RICHARD LAPCHICK As MLB evolved from a sport and matured into a business,it increasingly sought what all businesses seek in the face of competition: cheap resources in the form of players.In baseball,however,the player is the labor as well as the raw material, while the processors are managers, coaches, and trainers. As a combined labor/ material resource, a player group is subject to neocolonial appropriation in baseball as in other“manufacturing”processes. MLB’s history reflects its internal and external neocolonial initiatives among European immigrant, Native American, rural white, black, and Latino players. MLB’s neocolonial pursuits result from nineteenth-century cultural influences that contributed to baseball’s development as a white, urban, middle-class sport and as a Progressive Era business. MLB’s strategy and tactics mirror America’s social and business development of the times and reflect an increasing emphasis on exploiting the sport as a profitable business.To accomplish its procurement objectives, MLB employed economic hard power coercion more than soft power attractions, resulting in the buildup of a resistance that eventually resulted in the loss of control of labor costs. Integration of the sport was fundamentally a business decision to secure cheap player talent. While removing the color barrier in 1947 was profitable, BASEBALL AS A NEOCOLONIALIST: ABUSING POWER 71 MLB nevertheless enhanced opportunities for racial minorities in the sports and broader entertainment businesses. Although the game started as an amateur, Anglo-oriented, middle-class urban sport, it also quickly attracted working-class European immigrants and their sons,who helped form an inexpensive source for players as the game turned professional in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Much of the team ownership emerged from that immigrant group, which achieved middle-class status in the melting pot era. As the twentieth century arrived, MLB selectively recruited financially disadvantaged Native American and white Cuban players but eschewed African Americans because of the prevailing biases of segregated black-white American society. MLB’s exploitation of Native Americans, however, was not so much in securing cheap player talent as in insensitively translating their culture into demeaning mascots, logos, and team nicknames.Two of the sixteen teams that comprised the American and National Leagues from 1903 to 1952 had Indian nicknames and the concomitant logos and mascots. Those two teams maintained their Indian identity as MLB shifted locations and expanded.No new teams,however,have used an Indian connection,perhaps to reflect cultural sensitivity or at least to demonstrate political correctness. As Philip J. Deloria observed in a book of the same name, “playing Indian” was very popular in early 1900s America, reflecting a romantic desire to preserve the frontier mythology.1 White American males appropriated and essentialized Indian rituals and dress in various fraternal groups. This appropriation complemented MLB’s pastoral mythology. The Boston NL team changed its nickname from Beaneaters to Braves in 1913 and the Cleveland AL team switched from Lajoies to Indians two years later. Boston’s name derived from its new owner, James Gaffney, who used the nickname of his Tammany Hall fraternal society and political machine. Cleveland sportswriters chose “Indians” as a generally popular replacement for its nickname, which had honored the since departed player-manager and future Hall of Famer Napoleon Lajoie. To defend against subsequent Native American protests, the club falsely claimed that it chose the nickname to honor Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot Indian who briefly played outfield for the team in the late nineteenth century. In fact, local sportswriters recommended the popular school/college nickname to the team without referring to Sockakexis.2 Major League teams’ pursuit of cheap players in selected areas (colonies) of the country from the 1920s through the 1950s resembled a domestic version of nineteenth-century European colonialism. In the late 1920s, the St. Louis Cardinals, located at MLB’s western boundary, ventured south and 72 BASEBALL AS A NEOCOLONIALIST: ABUSING POWER west into rural America to recruit poor white farm boys. Other teams later followed the initiative throughout the country and thus created what MLB appropriately called the farm system that controlled the Minor Leagues. In post–World War II America, which was rethinking its segregationist position against African Americans because of...