A recurring challenge for me as a Wednesday columnist on international politics is that every four years I must compose my column before the outcome of the U.S. presidential election is clear. So after a campaign season that saw U.S. politics plunge into ever-greater depths of polarization, I thought I’d write about a contest that had been decided at the time of writing—this year’s World Series, won by the Los Angeles Dodgers over the New York Yankees—and the kinder, gentler vision of the U.S. one can still find in baseball fields and stadiums across the country. As a crucial symbol of shared identity, understanding the importance of baseball to life in the U.S. can provide indications of how the country can overcome the challenges it faces in an age of polarization and populism.
As an offshoot of ball games that had their origins in early modern England, baseball’s history as a sport parallels the emergence of the U.S. as an independent republic. Yet its codification through Abner Doubleday’s set of formal rules in the 1830s and 1840s also drew on influences from Canadian versions of the game, an early demonstration of how baseball could be both a symbol of U.S. identity as well as a form of transnational culture shared with many other societies. By 1900, though entrenched racial structures prevented the integration of non-white players for another half century, baseball had become America’s national pastime, linking a grassroots game involving people of all class backgrounds with financially lucrative professional leagues made up of clubs with huge fan bases.
The game’s underlying value system in the century that followed still embodied its roots in the democratic ideals of the early American republic, without sacrificing its connections with the cultural traditions of other societies. By the 1950s, baseball had spread so widely in countries with which the U.S. had strong interactions that successful leagues had been established in Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Japan and other states around Asia and the Western Hemisphere. And though structural racism meant that white, African American and Latino players played in separate leagues until after World War II, the sport’s transnational links as well as growing moral qualms over racial segregation in the U.S. led to a dismantling of racial barriers in 1947, over a decade before desegregation in the U.S. South began to take hold.
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Publish date : 2024-11-06 01:14:00
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