Baseball's Not Dead, and Neither is America

But it's not looking great...

As the Phillies stumbled their way through what became, somehow, a World Series season, I tried understanding why, amid a COVID era in which I managed an affordable housing campaign to a loss, subsequently struggled to land a job, developed anxiety, suffered my first panic attack, and experienced heartbreak, I cared and thought about the losingest franchise in United States sports history as passionately and as often as I did while growing up in South Jersey.

And unlike South Jersey Me, San Diego Me, the one in the trenches of adulthood, knows Major League Baseball is a commercialized behemoth comprised mostly of men and thinks every bad thing about society stems from MLB’s anti-trust exemption, which allows the league to skirt labor laws, impose television blackouts, and extort cities. At any one time, seemingly half of the owners, all of whom are billionaires, refuse to invest in their teams despite pocketing subsidies from their colleagues. The money I spend to watch and support the Phils, whose product is derived from the labor of players, enriches, say, the owner of the Miami Marlins, God help me.

Still I watch. Expressing either the last sane sentiment of the American conservative movement or an omen, George Will said, “[Baseball’s] a game that you can’t like if winning’s everything, and democracy is that way, too.” The amount of losing in baseball is staggering: Ted Williams failed six times out of ten in the greatest season ever for a hitter, and only once, in 1906, did a team lose less than a quarter of its games in a season, with those Chicago Cubs losing four times as much as the NBA’s all-time winningest team. Losing is the whole deal, making baseball similar to that Philly legend Rocky Balboa: you lose the title fight but win over Adrian by getting your ass kicked day in and day out and in the ring and out of it and still answering the bell. American democracy is that way, too.

The losses in our elections are small and large and local and systemic and occur ever year. Our system is predicated on accepting loss, which is why the emergence of Big Liars, election deniers, and insurrectionists have renewed a tradition of pronouncing the demise of American democracy. We’re still going to the polls, though, and more than ever. It’s because something in us knows trying is the point. That feeling and the institutions it props up are worth preserving.

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The New York Times shoved these thoughts into my brain when, on May 21, 2022, it informed me that both “Ginni Thomas Urged Arizona Lawmakers to Overturn Election” and “Roger Angell, Who Wrote About Baseball With Passion, Dies at 101.” The latter was the good news, since it profiled a literary man who, despite experiencing the Great Depression and World War II and rooting for the New York Mets, gave the world this:

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.”

On its face, Angell’s quote conjures a nostalgia for a past that never really existed and misses the mark on no one “caring deeply and passionately” anymore. Forty-six years after Angell wrote that for the New Yorker, in an analysis of the “epochal” 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, Donald Trump directed an army of zealots to attempt a coup.

The drift toward illiberalism and the shock of insurrection revived centuries-old prophecies. “The will of a majority is the will of a rabble,” John C. Calhoun had said. “Progressive democracy is incompatible with liberty." Calhoun was the Southern, pro-slavery statesman who, while serving as vice president in 1832, threw the young country into chaos by pushing “nullification,” a legal theory under which states could deem federal law null and void. In These Truths, Jill Lepore wrote, “The nullification crisis was … a debate about the limits of states’ rights and about the question of slavery, an early augur of the civil war to come.” Almost two hundred years later, the Times published an investigative series titled “Democracy Challenged.”

Baseball fans know this tradition well. “The rage for base ball [sic] appears to be dying out,” the Omaha World-Herald observed in 1890, eleven years before the establishment of the American League. In December 2022, the Michigan Journal of Economics asked, “Is Baseball a ‘Dying’ Sport?”

Baseball’s death notices usually focus on the game’s finances and viewership or its aesthetics and cultural significance, but to me baseball’s survival is tied not to dollars and eyeballs but rather to politics, and I worry about the game in today’s environment. It’s not that Major League Baseball will go away in an increasingly illiberal America. It’s that the league’s owners will curry favor with neoconservative overlords, who, by changing election law and interpreting them to their advantage, will permanently entrench themselves in power. The owners have long done this (their anti-trust exemption was awarded by a sympathetic Supreme Court in 1922), but in this possible future their extortion efforts will become more brazen, their labor practices more exploitative, and their game product more divorced from the profits they make and the desires of their customer bases. As it always has, baseball would then reflect the country: ignorant of popular sentiment and determined by contrived results. MLB would then be a tool of the state to enrich oligarchs who stand by as fascism creeps towards us fans.

This is not fantasy. In profiling Roman Abramovich, journalist Catherine Belton outlined how Russian President Vladimir Putin infiltrated British society and government through sports. Belton concluded Putin ordered Abramovich, obscenely wealthy from his controlling companies once owned by the Soviet state, to purchase the Chelsea Football Club because “Putin’s Kremlin had accurately calculated that the way to gain acceptance in British society was through the country’s greatest love, its national sport.” Since the invasion of Ukraine, most of Europe has strained to disentangle itself from Putin’s Russia. Belton wondered if “England has been too compromised by Russian money to do so.” In the States, MLB team owners contributed to the G.O.P. over the Democratic Party at a nearly 3-to-1 rate from 2016 to 2020, with owners of the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Chicago Cubs contributing directly to the Trump campaign and Trump-aligned political action committees in the 2020 election cycle. After losing that election, Trump organized his shock troops to overturn the results.

I sense that, through baseball fifty years ago, Roger Angell recognized this cynicism that has since metastasized. His lament for the extinction of caring is really his fear of an intolerance of losing—losing money, relationships, games, elections, whatever—for in losing lies truth and in truth lies freedom, as they say, but in all of it lies pain, or the potential of it. If there is anything that will at long last kill American democracy and in turn baseball, then it is our not wanting anymore to be Rocky Balboa: a nobody willing to lose for the ties that bind.

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“It’s telling that this whole framework is fundamentally oriented toward history,” Emma Baccalieri wrote for Sports Illustrated. “If baseball is dying now, it must have been alive then. It’s all very sentimental.” It’s a retrograde perspective borrowed from America, whose Founding Fathers nobly conceived and then handed off the Greatest Country on Earth, only for us forebears to turn in botch jobs. Standing in for George Washington, etc. is baseball's first class of players inducted into the Hall of Fame. It just hasn’t been the same since Ty Cobb batted a career .366 against seven all-White teams of dairy farmers and steamfitters.

“How does baseball live?” Baccalieri continued, “offers more to examine, structurally and personally, than does Why must baseball die?” The former question feels like identifying an optical illusion, a thing so obvious that I wondered why my brain didn’t notice it in the first place, and reorients the perspective to the future, although that future feels a little barren. It’s not bad, per se, just unarticulated. What’s the vision for baseball? What do we want baseball to look like five, twenty, fifty years from now? Who do we want to have access to the game, and how do we want them to do it? Who’s ‘we’? Still, none of these questions address why I even care.

First, baseball’s fun. In the pivotal third game of last year’s National League Division Series, the Atlanta Braves pitched the league’s leading The Thing impersonator and the N.L. Rookie of the Year runner-up Spencer Strider. He submitted two typically dominant innings, but then in the third the Phillies tallied five hits on five consecutive pitches, including a Bryce Bomb that landed two seats to my left. When Strider walked back to the dugout, relieved of his duties mid-inning, 45,000 Philadelphians troll-chanted his name, and in that moment I ceased to exist as an individual, serving only as one cell in a delirious mass, and my entire world had collapsed at Citizens Bank Park into an image, now frozen in my mind, of what it means to believe in and belong to something mystical, which is to say it was an image of how fun it is to beat someone in a game. To quote Nancy Pelosi, I don’t hate anybody, but that was the closest I’ve ever felt to salvation. (At 6:46 a.m. on the Monday after returning to San Diego, I texted my buddy back home with whom I attended the NLDS. “STOTTY,” I said, still buzzing from his nine-pitch at-bat that initiated the rally. My friend responded with a screenshot of a text I allegedly sent a month prior, on September 25. “Stott sucks and I’m over him,” it read. Bryson Stott and I had both come a long way.)

Miles and me, 2022 National League Division Series Game 3, Philadelphia, PA.

On the other side of that coin are the rationalizations both embodied by and included in baseball that inure me to the mountains of losses in the sport and democracy and life. The 99-loss 2015 Phillies had to walk so a future team—the 2022 team, it turned out—could run; the authoritarian impulses of the far-right is just a phase; and one day I’ll be and feel fine. These are my subconscious defenses against nihilism and what makes it seem like there’s a point to everyday pain. To put it in baseball terms, I need to know there’s always next year. I think that’s why American democracy still exists.

Written constitutions around the world have lasted, on average, seventeen years, as Jill Lepore pointed out in the New Yorker. The U.S.'s turns 234 this year (and by my last count baseball still has 234 fans). Lepore characterizes the U.S. Constitution today as brittle, considering it is virtually unamendable anymore, but it must also possess a resiliency to survive this long. That resiliency comes from us, for institutions take on the characteristics of the humans that make and sustain them. There is nothing inevitable about American democracy (or baseball). Its death is not a certainty, and that’s because people like me tell themselves the essential little lies—we need each other, it gets better, and it’s worth fighting for—to avoid being swallowed by what’s at the core of the Big Lie: that nothing matters, including how we treat people.