Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture Peter Carino (bio) David McGimpsey . Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 194 pp. Cloth, $29.95. David McGimpsey's Imagining Baseball proposes "to initiate a discussion of how representations of baseball make problematic the sport's place in a more extensive cultural argument" (p. 17). Despite his title's focus on popular culture, McGimpsey's "discussion" ranges over a wide variety of low-, middle-, and high-brow culture, from short stories by Hemingway, to popular films, to episodes of television programs that treat baseball. In this sense, the book attempts an inclusivity heretofore unknown in analyses of baseball fiction. Other artistic expressions of baseball—for example, painting, sculpture, poetry, and music—are not examined (though poetry is referenced from time to time), but to ask for more would be to ask too much since the book already constitutes an ambitious enterprise. As the publishing of the book by Indiana University Press would indicate, this is an academic study, written for those who read baseball as a metaphor for cultural values, good and bad. It will not appeal to those interested merely in statistics or chronicles of great teams or players. It will appeal to those interested in both the way baseball is appropriated as fictional subject matter to perpetuate and deflate myths of American experience and the way in which baseball as a business contributes to these myths while enacting the very commerce that they attempt to mask. McGimpsey organizes the book around various themes that serve the construction of baseball myth: to name a few, the lost Eden of the Black Sox scandal, the pastoral convention, the notion of the game as a reflection of democratic American values, and the game as a connection between generations, often expressed in the image of fathers playing catch with sons. Within [End Page 155] these motifs, he reads a variety of texts demonstrating how each is troubled by its antithesis: baseball has suffered corruption before and after the Black Sox; pastoralism is nostalgia for the values of a rural America that never existed, while the game has urban origins and is an urban business; the democracy of baseball long excluded minorities, and its American-ness has found fertile soil in other nations; and finally fathers and sons often have intensely complicated relations that a mere game of catch can neither articulate nor assuage. In this sense, the book is a deconstruction of literary celebrations of baseball; McGimpsey is not interested in showing how these myths serve intellectuals as temporary stays against confusion. Rather, he analyzes the reasons behind the need to create myths and how they serve the baseball business in perpetuating itself for intellectuals and fans who are willing to participate in the illusion. "Baseball fiction," McGimpsey reminds us, "also sells baseball" (p. 14). While McGimpsey punctures some of the intellectual pretensions informing baseball fiction—"it nominally marries a lowbrow, macho vigor to an intellectual and effeminate art form" (p. 111)—he himself cannot escape the intellectual activity that he deconstructs. This is, after all, a university press book, and the astute readings of literary baseball texts indicate the kind of elite critical training that makes it possible to intellectualize baseball in the first place, whatever one's origins or class allegiances may be. By including throwaway sitcom treatments of baseball next to writers of the canonical stature of Hemingway and Malamud, McGimpsey attempts to distance himself from the elitism he finds in intellectualizing baseball. While he admits that it is easy to recognize the difference between Moby Dick and the detritus of popular culture, he asserts that "developing certain systems of discrimination is impossible" (p. 26). This kind of antifoundationalism, currently pervading the academy in cultural studies programs, will annoy some readers in its reluctance to establish aesthetic criteria. On the other hand, McGimpsey takes pains to justify his view that all texts are important in assessing baseball's place in culture while commanding a style that underscores his democratic approach: "The erosion of baseball's television audiences after the players' strike of 1994 was not just the pique of cheesed-off fans...