The Devil’s Snake Curve: A Fan’s Notes from Left Field by Josh Ostergaard (review)

We all know a baseball fan whose outlook embraces the game and strong political opinion at the same time. The ones I know lean to the left, but there must be such fans on the right too. (Perhaps the friends of Rick Monday?) Josh Ostergaard is my kind of aficionado. His unconventional book The Devil’s Snake Curve is subtitled A Fan’s Notes from Left Field, just so no one is taken unawares.

Much of the text scorches baseball’s corporate (i.e., greedy) side and its penchant for wrapping itself in the flag, which includes American-style imperialism, the kind that blithely, almost unconsciously, styles baseball as redemptive force, good for the world’s untamed and unwashed. The phrase “devil’s snake curve” captures the notion exquisitely. Taken from the century-old sermonizing of Reverend Billy Sunday (who enjoyed allusions to his early pro career on the ball field), Satan’s special lure for young men is as wicked as the offerings of a crafty curve baller. As Ostergaard would be the first to tell you, the game will distract you from life’s imperatives, have you thinking the fate of the Kansas City Royals (imprinted on Ostergaard’s psyche at birth) is consequential, or, worse yet, lead you to believe that baseball and virtue are synonymous.

Ostergaard disabuses readers of such errors with an astute reading of the record. The approach is ingenious “assemblage,” in the manner of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. News clips, historical snippets, and personal memories get stitched together to create a convincing montage. Certain thematic elements appear and reappear. The Yankees owners from Del Webb to George Steinbrenner are evil incarnate, while the story of baseball for the Japanese proves both revelatory and noble. (Del Webb expressed pride in his role as prime contractor for the construction of World War II Japanese re-location camps in Arizona!)

Ostergaard pins down how baseball comes to mean so many things for its diverse crowd of shut-ins, hearty recreational players, and teary little leaguers. The answer to the riddle is imagination: “Baseball lives in imagination, and the imagination is messy. Memories, stories, details, images, and associations jumble together. … Meanings can be stretched and molded into something that is equal parts sport, religion, and political theater” (205). Thus, the fan can be manipulated. But recognizing this, as with other “cultural understandings,” a fan can resist, as well. According to Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist (Ostergaard has a background in anthropology), ownership of the “means of production” includes ideology. The ideas that rationalize subordination of the masses (fans) are under the control of those owning the means of production. It is the ruling class that shapes the ideological component of the superstructure, including baseball’s peculiar American mythologies. Ostergaard offers his own example:

Baseball’s steroid scandal seemed more shocking to (the older) men, who grew up in a time when players like Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Carl Yastrzemski were seen as heroes. When I was a kid, Denny McLain, the last man to win thirty games, had already done time in prison. … I never had a hero, and I never felt deprived for it. When it finally broke, the steroid scandal had been almost natural to me, like an extension of everything I had I had seen so far in sports. … I had believed so many good things about our nation that had proven untrue once we began to use torture, imprisonment without trial, and domestic spying as tools in the War on Terror. I realized the steroid scandal was just another window into the problems of America: fake home run records, illusory weapons of mass destruction, economic bubbles hyped by Wall Street. All symptoms of the same syndrome. Ballplayers bloated on steroids, fans bloated on corn syrup and sloth. Both rotten with greed and hubris.

(162)

The Devil’s Snake Curve...