The End of Baseball and the Last Fan[*]

Into the Post-Baseball Age

On October 1, 1967 – an unbelievable forty years ago - the Boston Red Sox took two games from the Minnesota Twins in a season-ending doubleheader. I, like most young men growing up in Massachusetts at the time, was utterly and completely enraptured by my Red Sox, and in particular by the stunning performance put on that season by Carl Yastrzemski. By beating the Twins, the Red Sox clinched at least a tie for the American League pennant.

Later that evening, while I was attending a boys’ sports banquet, word came over that the Angels had just beaten the Detroit Tigers, handing the Red Sox the American League Pennant. Pandemonium is almost too weak a word to describe the scene that ensued as hundreds of 9-12 year old boys and their long-suffering fathers vociferously celebrated the achievement of “The Impossible Dream” Red Sox of 1967. The names resonate today as if I were still 9 year old: Yaz, Jim Lonborg, Tony Conigliaro, George Scott, Joe Foy, Rico Petrocelli, Mike Andrews, and manager Dick Williams.

Little did I understand that as I jumped for joy and screamed at the top of my lungs that I was not just witness to a historical achievement, but was doing so in the last great age of baseball.

Baseball is a quintessentially American game, born of the rough recreational pastimes of a tough rural people. It is essentially a pre-modern game. As it matured and evolved and was adopted by the urban base in the early 20th Century it was transformed into a mythical shared link to the pre-industrial past. It became a romantic theme that resonated throughout American life, one in which the traditional southern and rural players were soon joined by Italian and Jewish and Irish immigrant kids and, eventually, blacks and Latinos. It was the one thing we could turn to in commonality. It became more than a game, it became an icon.

But cultural icons don’t do very well spanning more than one age. They can reach back a couple of generations, but as society moves away they must at some point wither and be replaced by a new link.

Those of us who are lifelong Red Sox addicts measure time and even history itself by the exploits of the scarlet hose. In retrospect I see the ’67 Red Sox as perhaps the last pure representation of that link to a shared past.

By 1975, when the Sox again won the AL pennant and lost another 7 game thriller – this time to the Cincinnati Reds – one could already sense the rot beginning to sink in. The players seemed to be wearing pajamas as the polyester of the disco age began to make a mockery of baseball’s traditional uniforms. Big hair, loud behavior and big money had begun to change the essence of the game. It began to rob it of the shared cultural characteristics.

By 1986,when the Red Sox once more won the AL pennant and once more lost the Series in seven games – to the New York Mets – free agency had begun to destroy the team structures of baseball, leading to a mercenary player attitude that was anathema to the traditions of the game. One began to hear rock music on loudspeakers in between innings in place of the traditional organ. What a clear signal. The artifacts and sounds of the pre-electric past were no longer to be enjoyed as an explicit association with that past. Nope, they were to be shunned as outdated.

The things that define an age are as much a function of the bookends on either end as they are of the stuff in the middle. As I aged, the prospect of the red Sox winning a World Series began to take on ominous overtones for me. The 1917 Red Sox won the World Series, and when they sold star Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees they defined the starting edge of the Great Age of Baseball. It only made sense that the baseball gods would close the great age in similar fashion. Thus, although the lifelong Red Sox fan in me longed for a World Series win with a ferocity embarrassing to a 40-something, part of me knew it would signal the end. When the Sox pulled it off in 2004 with a stunning comeback against the Yankees in the Divisional and sweep against the Cardinals in the Series, I knew what it meant.

We had reached the end of baseball.

Oh, there is still a game of some sort going on out there. But it’s not baseball. Boston’s self-proclaimed “idiots” were a bunch of millionaire players on steroids, cavorting amid the shiny advertisements and television lights, playing four hour games to make room for the commercials, serenaded by too-loud rock music and fuzzy mascots between innings. There is absolutely nothing about the game as won by the Red Sox in 2004 that connects us in any way to our shared past. If you doubt me, just drive around town on a summer’s eve and look for a pickup game going on. That is gone. The kids are inside playing video games. Baseball has more in common with pro wrestling than with what we knew as youngsters.

So when the Beantown boys pulled it off again this year I cheered again. But it was like cheering for a child’s punk rock band. You do it out of obligation, not out of pride.

Luckily, I am old enough to have a clear memory of the game as it was. I’ll have to hold on to that. It is all that is left of a great game.

[*] With apologies to Francis Fukuyama

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