Baseball America's National pastime.

With the formation of National League, it then became an understood symbol of national game. The event was not brought about that easily. There was a tug of war between football, basketball, and baseball, and for the women tennis. Although the other games were more developed due to British colonial culture that matured the games. While baseball originally from colored people, was still in its initial stages.

There was also the controversial implication of adopting baseball as the national game as an average social individual is considered to be a white, Anglo-Saxon, of middle class or urban man. While the average baseball player at that time was a colored Cuban, who was considered a low man during the Progressive Era and not trainable because lack of education and social upbringing.

 However, progress was made when these nostalgic themes, together with personal financial concerns, guided owners toward practices that in retrospect appear unfair to players and detrimental to the progress of the game. Reserve clauses, blacklisting, and limiting franchise territories, for example, were meant to keep a consistent roster of players on a team, build fan loyalty, and maintain the game's local flavor. These practices also violated anti-trust laws and significantly restricted the economic power of the players. Owners vigorously fought against innovations, ranging from the night games and radio broadcasts to the inclusion of African-American players. Nonetheless, the image of baseball as a spirited civic endeavor persisted, even in the face of outright corruption, as witnessed in the courts' leniency toward the participants in the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

On April 14, 1911, the Polo Grounds, the field where the New York Giants baseball club of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs played its home games was destroyed in a raging fire. A year after a new steel and concrete Polo Grounds had been built for the comfort and convenience of the baseball fans. It was the apparent permanency of its structure, which symbolized the apparent permanency of baseball as a game that would be forever identified with a large American city.

 The Polo Grounds was by no means unique in being a steel and concrete stadium that replaced an older wooden structure in the years between 1908 and 1915. Hilltop Park in New York also became symptomatic of the state of ballparks in the era just preceding the emergence of their concrete and steel "permanent" successors. First, the capacity of most of the wooden ballparks was comparatively small, especially when measured against structures such as the new Polo Grounds. That capacity was primarily a function of the fact that major league baseball, at the time of its "official" beginnings in 1903, was not very far removed from the game that had first started on a professional basis in the 1860s.

National pasttime- The 1890s as a transition decade:

At the time of such social integration, in 1890s, only a few sports were created with discipline and played at academic institutions. Such games included basketball, volleyball (both, not coincidentally, in a particular place, the

Springfield, Mass., YMCA). The questions was raised which game would serve and create a sense of patriotism. A game that could be played by anyone, anywhere in the country, liked by all. Since basketball and volleyball are only a choice of a few states, it became evident that baseball is the only one left that would be liked and appreciated by everyone in the country.

The era also introduced the emergence of a leisure class who are willing to spend more time at recreational activities. That is when professional athletes were given priority to joining the National League, giving the white male preference instead of the usual colored players. These players were meant to have the effect on its audience, a feeling of closeness with the game when they watched their fellow color man play in the field. Thence, modern sports expanded through and beyond middle class. World War I (1918-9)  marked the significance of the widespread of baseball to larger American audience.

The behaviors and beliefs about athletic sports became the standard behavior and beliefs. The urban and middle class reformers advocated change and improved or “progressed” games. They initiated regulations that were more connected to the white Americans. Improved conditions were introduced which included efficient players, order in game schedules and a disciplined audience. This reflected the kind of society that was building outside the athletic field.  

The construction of new ballparks thus symbolized that major league baseball had come to be regarded as a potentially lucrative business, as distinguished from a diversion from the business world. And yet the central attractions of baseball as a spectator sport, the generation of new owners realized, lay in the fact that it was a diversion from the business world, a game echoing the associations of childhood play and leisured, sporting pursuits. Paradoxically, the more baseball was thought of as a pastime, a retreat from urban life as much as a confirmation of its vitality, a vicarious experience as much as an observational experience for the "cranks" and "bugs" (later "fans") who attended games, the more it appeared to become a spectacle that was socially desirable, as well as emotionally uplifting, to attend.

 From its earliest modern decades, baseball was thought of as a business, a form of entertainment for profit, but implicitly presented as a much more engaging spectacle than a circus or an opera or a play. It conjured up idyllic rural and pastoral associations, although staged in an urban setting.

In modern day however, the proliferation of professional sports and television channels is another force likely to keep baseball from storming back to the center of America's sports consciousness. The bonds of fan loyalty originally forged by summer afternoons and evenings spent listening to one's team on the radio are rapidly dissolving. Younger fans flip channels, mixing a few innings of the superstation's game with the World Wrestling Federation or a favorite evening soap opera. Football and basketball  - women's as well as men's  - televise better than baseball.

Baseball in the Progressive Era Culture

The experience of playing the sport in one's youth, playing baseball as a kid is filled with humiliation for many youngsters (and their parents). When a kid strikes out, or boots a grounder, and that happens routinely in all levels of baseball, almost everyone else in the ballpark is watching that action. When a kid plays soccer, he or she, for many years, can just run around in a mainly anonymous way, and do what young kids do best, which is falling down or chasing after moving objects. Parents like watching those activities a lot better than watching Tommy strike out or Jane have the ball bounce off her glove.

But the players’ parents are seen cheering on, incentive for their energy to play, a source of motivation for going on till they score bases. This trend is not new, but age old. Eversince the Progressive era, baseball has seen score of parents, onlookers, and fans spending more then quarter of their time at the ball game. Either they are on a date, present there for their sons, husband, boyfriends, brothers etc. Then there are the fans who would spend all their money and time just to have a glimpse at their favorite star.

It is therefore no wonder is considered a national past time. Baseball's roots in this more traditional culture still run deep. Good old country boys continue in disproportionate numbers to populate the game. Chewing tobacco and sunflower seeds and expectorating in all directions remain important indicators of acculturation, and a certain folksy wisdom is deemed appropriate.  Today's ballplayers hearken back to America's transcendent heroes of yesteryear, cowboys. When they roam wide-open grassy pastures, when pitchers confront hitters in classic Main Street man-to-man encounters at 60 feet, six inches, when relief pitchers come dashing in (as did the cavalry) to the rescue, are these not all replays of scenes from our western frontier?

The clock did not drive an older America. Farm life was task-oriented. Only when the job got done was the "day" over. So, too, with baseball. The game concludes not as in other sports when the clock winds down (amid frantic "last-minute" maneuverings), but when the last man is out.  Folks back then were more patient, less insistent upon instant gratification. So it is in baseball that patience takes precedence.  Fans wait patiently for raw prospects to mature in the minors. The good hitter stands as a paragon of patience, so also the fielders who must remain alert in the face of long periods of inactivity. Patience must necessarily prevail when the tail end of the order is due up. Finally, is there a fan around who won't patiently "wait until next year"?

WRITERS IMPLICATIONS 

Both baseball and football often presented by historians as epitomizing rationalization, bureaucratization (e.g. Gelber on baseball, Westby/Sack on football). Yet also often pictured--and were seen by many contemporaries, as return to nature and more primitive forces, e.g. baseball as "pastoral" (Guttmann thesis); and "Football is to physical culture what the bullfight is to agriculture"--Thorstein Veblen.

Some baseball writers treat their subject as if it existed in a vacuum, separate from the larger society. Others take a more holistic approach, viewing the sport as a facet of American culture. Jules Tygiel, a history professor at San Francisco State University, is in the latter category. In Past Time, he looks at baseball's relationship to the nation's history - how game and country have grown up together.

Although he still has much to work on, he does manages to link up for instance, the use of radio to bring ballgames to audiences across America was an important part of the development of that medium. Before the radio era, baseball play-by- play reports were sent by telegraph and posted on elaborate scoreboards in places such as Madison Square Garden (and in less grand venues). Crowds came to "watch" the game with much the same intensity as those who were at the ballpark.

 When radio arrived, people could follow their teams from their own living rooms, and listening to games became a daily habit for many. The author describes all of this and offers a particularly good discussion of how radio then was superseded by television. Among the other topics he explores is the rise of the celebrity, as exemplified by Babe Ruth. The Yankee slugger, says Mr. Tygiel, "symbolized not only the exuberance and excesses of the 1920s, but the emergent triumph of personality and image." Ruth's exploits and image, he adds, were "lavishly chronicled on radio and in print, memorialized in photos and film, elevated to a new form of adoration in testimonial advertising, and molded by shrewd public relations."

In Patriotic Games, historian Stephen Pope explores the ways sport was transformed from a mere amusement into a metaphor for American life. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, sport became the most pervasive popular cultural activity in American society. During these years, basketball was invented, football became a mass spectator event, and baseball soared to its status as the "national pasttime."

 Pope demonstrates how America's sporting tradition emerged from a society fractured along class, race, ethnic, and gender lines. Institutionalized sport became a trans-class mechanism for packaging power and society in preferred ways--it popularized an interlocking set of cultural ideas about America's quest for national greatness.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the intimate connection established between sport and national holiday celebrations. As Pope reveals, Thanksgiving sports influenced the holiday's evolution from a religious occasion to a secular one. On the Fourth of July, sporting events infused patriotic rituals with sentiments that emphasized class conciliation and ethnic assimilation.

In a time of social tensions, economic downturns, and unprecendented immigration, the rituals and enthusiasms of sport, Pope argues, became a central component in the shaping of America's national identity. On the surface, sports and new forms of leisure also seem to run counter to themes of rationalization, organization, and efficiency embodied in professionalization. This relates to the larger paradox that the progressive era was one of growing rationalization, bureaucratization and professionalization of every aspect of life, but also of cult of masculinity, strenuosity, militarism; and to the larger issue of the interpretation of the age as one of (a) rationalization and a quest for efficiency and (b) moralism, emotionalism, nostalgia rooted in status anxieties.

G. Edward White suggested in the conclusion to his 1996 book "Creating the National Pastime" that baseball could no longer be considered the national pastime as it was in the first half of the century -- and recently maintained that view despite the upswing caused by the 1998 season. "I still think fundamentally things are the same," White, a University of Virginia law professor, said recently. "By fundamentally I mean it's not possible for baseball to regain the special status it had in the period I wrote about. This is primarily because of the proliferation of other sports and free agency. It's fruitless now to ask the question: What is the national pastime? The different sports offer different experiences." White looks at the gambling and cheating that were a part of the game early in the century, and when he examines the growth and economic importance of night baseball and of radio and TV broadcasts. He also highlights the influence of Hank Greenberg and Joe DiMaggio on American attitudes about ethnicity, on the business culture of an industry in which competitors also are partners, on the evolution of the relationship between major league teams and the journalists who cover them. He shows how seemingly irrational business decisions, inspired in part by the self-interest of the owners but also by their nostalgia for the game, transformed baseball into the national pastime.

CONCLUSION

Baseball has managed to retain something of the flavor and fervor of a past that recognized fewer headings and demanded more stringent standards. Consider its preoccupation with "errors," "saves," "sacrifices," "unearned" runs, "steals," "perfect" games, "fundamentals" and "good" at-bats. Is this not a vocabulary better suited to pulpit preaching than to playing ball? So, as yet another season begins, millions of true believers will dig in for the long pull. It appears they are drawn to it in part because the game offers them a gateway to an idealized past, to a timeless unchanging period when life seemed more orderly and manageable, youth more enduring, essential truths more readily discerned and accepted, an age of stability and innocence.

From their strong belief in biological evolution, Progressive social reformers elevated the human body as both means & ends of human evolution. As they focused on the body, they also rationalized & justified modern athletic sports, esp. competitive team sports, as important "tools" for improving society. Via the sport programs they developed, they extended modern athletic sports to more Americans. In so doing, they accelerated the processes of institutionalizing modern sports & producing "standard" behaviors & beliefs, which underlay the 20th-century's national sporting culture and past time.

FORECAST

Despite it being a national game for over a century, baseball is slowly losing its charms. The last few decades evidently showed that the national past time of the young ones has changed. Their trend and habits has also changed from physical games to more electronic type. At first it was the video games, now it is computer games. The transition of games from physical environment to the electronic environment, shows that baseball is going through another kind of transition era. This time however, is most probably its devolution.

Furthermore, those who like physical games have also changed their trend, from baseball to basketball and wrestling. These evidences shows that baseball is no longer going to have the status of national game but rather slowly fade out from the sporting scene.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

• G. Edward White: Creating The National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903-1953

• Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof - the story of the 1919 Black Sox
  
  The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn - a recollection of the 1952-3 Brooklyn Dodgers
  

Secondary Sources

• CULTURE WATCH / Dingers Could Spell Danger for New Baseball Era. , Newsday, 09-13-1998

• William Gildea Washington Post Staff Writer, Power Propels Game to Glory; Homer Race Lured Folks Back and they found a Lot to Like. , The Washington Post, 04-02-1999

• Richard Skolnik, Baseball: The True Age of Innocence. , Newsday, 04-11-1994

• Philip Seib, Baseball, America have grown together. , The Dallas Morning News, 06-25-2000, pp 9J.

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