Making Sense of the National Pastime

If baseball is no longer the most popular sport in the United States—and national preference polls and television ratings strongly suggest it is not—the game still possesses great cultural cachet. Football and basketball may indeed fit twenty-first-century American life better, but neither sport has generated the volume of writing that baseball has. For nearly two centuries, the self-proclaimed national pastime has served as a handy symbol of national vigor and national innocence. It is noteworthy that, while use of performance enhancers is arguably greater in football, it is use in baseball that has drawn the most attention and has been an emblem of modern-day disregard for fair play. Of no other sport has it thus far been said, as historian Jacques Barzun did in 1954, that whoever “wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.”¹

That baseball embodies something essential and timeless about America is a sentiment of longstanding and one that a good many sports historians have set about to debunk. In the last twenty years, they have challenged the notion that baseball was first and foremost a rural game. Noting how the game was engineered in the late nineteenth century to exemplify the emerging values of industrial America, they have argued that the link between the seasons and the professional game that commentators often extol was not so much a matter of tradition as a consequence of the rise of professional organizations that set the season for money-making purposes. In the same vein, they challenge those who rhapsodize about baseball’s freedom from the clock by pointing out that the nine-inning length was designed to make the sport more concise and manageable for its spectators. Nor has the game ever been a repository of fair and honest play. Corked bats, illegal pitches, outright deception, fixed contests, and other forms of cheating have infused the game since the professional era began.²

The historical baseball, as opposed to the platitude-filled version of armchair philosophers, has had a multitude of cultural uses and valences. As these three disparate books demonstrate, the kinds of functions the game has performed and the identities and loyalties it has generated have been extraordinarily varied. David Vaught’s farmers, Samuel Regaldo’s Issei and Nissei, and Tim Wendel’s 1968 Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals all used baseball as a way to make their own meanings and to work out their own understandings of American values rather than simply performing a well-worn script. Which is not to say its meanings have all been particularly weighty.

Of the three books, Vaught’s Farmers’ Game is the most provocative. Consisting of six essays, it is as much a history of rural life as of the way baseball was played in rural America since the nineteenth century. Taken together, Vaught’s case studies chart the rise and fall of market-attuned yeoman. His nineteenth-century studies illustrate the rising arc of prosperity, fueled by hard work and luck. His twentieth-century examples dwell on decline: near-abandoned communities and values that do not eventuate in market success. Throughout, farmers have used baseball as both sounding board and theater.

By concentrating on what baseball meant to farmers, Vaught aims to revise the implications that mainstream baseball historians have drawn from the debunking of the official origin story. That story, promulgated by an official commission in the early twentieth century on the basis of two dubious letters, was that Civil War hero Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New...