The Los Angeles Dodgers have been crowned World Series champions, and Donald Trump has been elected to another term as President of the United States. That makes the latest World Series something even more poignant than it otherwise would have been. It is difficult to even pretend that we have a national pastime in a country where we live in two alternate realities, and one of them is quite comfortable with Nazis and fascism.
Baseball has always attempted to play the role of national uniter. But in 2024, it takes more than the James Earl Jones speech in Field of Dreams to get people to sing “Kumbaya.” Yet while baseball sees itself as a unifying force, it has always played a contradictory role in our society. It has, in its history, been a symbol of segregation and, in the form of Jackie Robinson, sacrifice, integration, and inspiration. Franchises had quotas on players of color well into the 1960s, yet by the 1970s, some teams could actually field an all-Black and Afro-Latino lineup.
Baseball is a sport of epic heroes, like Roberto Clemente, and snarling villains, like Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Today, it is a platform that has introduced the public to a generation of superstars from Japan, South Korea, and across Latin America. In the country’s current viciously anti-immigrant climate, this proud public face of global diversity, and its impact, should not go unnoticed.
This is nothing new. The idea of national unity was central to the first professional league’s founding. Baseball emerged as a professional sport in the aftermath of the Civil War, during which soldiers were known to have played. The people who launched this new league—a group that included sporting goods pioneer and ace marketeer Albert G. Spalding—wanted to appeal to the idea of a new United States. They even conjured the founding myth that prominent Union Army General Abner Doubleday “invented” the sport up in Cooperstown, New York. Yet the game did not derive from that hallowed site of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Instead, it was given many of the rules that still exist today by Alexander Cartwright. And the place where he came up with the first rule book? Hoboken, New Jersey.
Baseball had been known as the national pastime since the middle of the nineteenth century, so named in a handwritten letter to New York’s Sunday Mercury that was signed merely as “A Baseball Lover.” It proudly held that title for more than a century. It was the most popular sport in the country, and its stars were national heroes rivaled only by Hollywood.
When men—Black and white—went off to war in 1941, women played in the All-American Girls in addition to working in the factories. Then, of course, the battle to integrate the national pastime mirrored the fight brewing in the Jim Crow South in the aftermath of the war. It was no coincidence that in 1947, when baseball was finally integrated, Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey made sure his choice, Jackie Robinson, was a veteran. Even in the 1960s, when everyone seemed so divided, there were teams like Bob Gibson’s Cardinals or the 1969 Miracle Mets that had the ability to capture the national imagination.
Today’s cultural consumption could not be more different. There is no national imagination, in part because the battle for our smartphone-addled attention has never been so overwhelming. There is so much to watch or engage with or comment on that we end up isolating ourselves in our own mini-niches. If there is one sport gasping the last breath of the monoculture, it is not baseball, but rather football. Baseball remains a robust sport, but at the professional level, it is no longer national. It is regional. Fans know the players on their own teams but, broadly, don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of every player on every team as in the olden days.
As a regional sport, the national pastime has managed to survive and, in many markets, even thrive. But the idea of anything being “national” as long as a fascist movement stalks the halls of power and the streets is a pipe dream.
Maybe we won’t survive as a country. But those who want to preserve the union are weaker due to baseball’s inability today to play the role it once did. Its professional creation was born out of a need for unity following the Civil War. Today, its absence from the national consciousness hampers our ability to wield it against division. We are weaker for its absence.