Baseball and the Cultural Logic of American Individualism

Abstract

The 1980s were tumultuous years for the sport that many Americans still call the “national game” or the “national pastime.” For major league baseball, it was a decade marked by increasingly hostile relations between labor and management, resulting in three strikes, including one that interrupted the 1981 season and lasted for fifty days, causing the season to be shortened and many of the year's records to be marked with an asterisk. In 1984, Peter Ueberroth, the man who miraculously made the Los Angeles Olympics turn a profit, was hired as Commissioner of Baseball, and he soon led the owners in a conspiracy to restrict the free-agent market in order to keep players' salaries down. There were a variety of lawsuits brought against major league baseball, not only because of the owners' collusive actions but also because of ostensible racial and gender-based discrimination. And there were scandals over the drug use, sexual misadventures, and gambling habits of prominent players and managers. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, owners' profits were up, players' salaries were up, and attendance at ball games was up. Baseball's prominence in the national imagination was further bolstered by the success of the film version ofThe Natural(1984), which put an end to the conventional Hollywood wisdom that baseball films are box-office poison and paved the way for a spate of baseball films toward the end of the 1980s, includingBull Durham(1988),Eight Men Out(1988),Stealing Home(1988),Major League(1989), andField of Dreams(1989). The 1980s gave new meaning to Jacques Barzun's oft-quoted declaration that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.” In his bookTake Time for Paradise, A. Bartlett Giamatti, who succeeded Ueberroth as Commissioner of Baseball, rephrased Barzun's insight with double-edged puns that captured the ambivalences of the decade. “I believe that thinking about baseball will tell us a lot about ourselves as a people,” he wrote: “Baseball is part of America's plot, part of America's mysterious, underlying design — the plot in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of our national life.”