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Creating the National Pastime

By Dr. John D. Eigenauer
September 29, 2006

G. Edward White’s Creating the National Pastime is so dense with insight that it should be read slowly. It is carefully and cogently argued, exceptionally well written, and meticulously researched. Its main virtue is the author’s ability to make sense of baseball against a larger cultural, social, and legal background.

The author argues in the second chapter, for example, that shortly into the twentieth century, the public, courts, owners, and players began to treat baseball differently from other economic enterprises. Three unusual cultural attitudes lay at the foundation of this special treatment: “that the audiences for baseball games wanted close competition among rival clubs,” “that a significant portion of their vicarious satisfaction in watching games would come from their role as ‘home town’ residents,” and that “their ‘home town’ affiliation with a team was likely to be enhanced if the identity of the players on that team remained relatively constant.” White demonstrates that “baseball executives… structured the enterprise of baseball… in a fashion consistent with those assumptions.” These assumptions were reflected in rules that were “so fundamental” and “so enduring” that “they can be said to have defined the sport for the first fifty years of its twentieth-century existence.”

These three rules were: the reserve clause, baseball teams’ territorial autonomy, and the structure of the trade in baseball talent as a “buyers’ monopoly.” This last rule took the form of “blacklisting” players who attempted to change teams or leagues, or who generally sought freedom to determine their own playing or financial conditions. White uses these three themes throughout the book to demonstrate that baseball’s resistance to change resulted most often from its determination to keep these three rules intact.

Poli! Long before the Curt Flood case, Nap Lajoie challenged the reserve clause.

For example, White argues that the principle of territorial autonomy arose first from owners building new concrete and steel parks between 1908 and 1923. Many of these parks were “associated with the ‘City Beautiful’ movement in growing American cities.” They were built with the express intent of heightening civic pride and cultivating a sense of permanence among a growing urban population. As America’s demographics changed, new cities grew, and the population shifted to the West Coast, baseball owners clung stubbornly to territoriality; they saw their ballparks as permanent and their cities’ allegiances as essential parts of baseball’s makeup. Even when attendance in certain cities suffered horribly, owners maintained antiquated rules that made franchise movement virtually impossible even though it may have guaranteed financial success to struggling clubs.

Radio and television expansion also played a role in territoriality. Like nearly every innovation in the first decades of the new century, baseball owners and clubs fought against radio coverage. They did so because they thought that radio would decrease their only significant revenue source: attendance. White demonstrates that The Sporting News parroted the owner’s objections, in some cases casting baseball on the radio as un-American. A few writers, however, saw that television and radio would enhance partisanship and extend the geographical boundaries from which teams commonly drew. Unfortunately, these writers never convinced most owners that broadcasts of baseball games were less than a menace. It took the owners decades to realize that radio broadcasts could provide extra revenue, draw fans from far away, and enhance territoriality.

Long before radio, however, baseball fought its most important wars in court. As a professor of law, White writes his finest and most insightful chapters when dealing with legal cases that shaped baseball history. In particular, he writes with ease and insight about legal challenges to the reserve clause, by far the most important aspect of baseball’s legal history in the first fifty years of the twentieth century.

The first case that tested baseball’s reserve clause involved Napoleon Lajoie. White does an excellent job recounting the case’s history, explaining its legal intricacies, and contextualizing it. He also shows that baseball began to be treated as more than a commercial enterprise because of this case. Specifically, it began to acquire protected status. White explains that all contemporary legal logic would have denied the legitimacy of baseball’s player contracts because they lacked mutuality—indeed the reserve clause and the ten day clause violated all known principles of employer-employee contract law. But because baseball was gaining special status as the “National Pastime”, even judges ignored legal precedent and logic to protect baseball’s owners from undue competition and supposedly sustain competitive balance and hometown partisanship through the reserve clause. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the courts consistently upheld baseball’s “special status” by granting it immunity from anti-trust laws and elemental forces of unionization. Indeed, White argues that baseball’s unique status became so ingrained in American consciousness that even players testifying before Congress claimed that the reserve clause was necessary for baseball’s survival.

By 1950, however, White argues that larger social, cultural, and economic forces were wearing down the rules and notions that upheld baseball’s privileged status. The St. Louis Browns, Boston Braves, and Philadelphia A’s simply could not exist in divided markets and moved to growing cities. These teams moving broke down traditionally ingrained ideas about what was necessary for baseball to succeed and combined with other innovations such as television, night baseball, and blacks in baseball to form an entirely new sport. White argues that America’s social and technological maturation dragged baseball kicking and screaming into modernity as it clung stubbornly to an idealized self image. That idealized image, it turns out, is baseball as National Pastime—something far more than sport, economic enterprise, or hobby. When that happened, baseball became one variety of sports entertainment among several, lost its special status, and watched its governing principles fade away.

I highly recommend G. Edward White’s Creating the National Pastime with one caveat: it is historical scholarship. You should be forewarned that it is not light reading, and that its dense, focused language is challenging. If that sounds inviting, you will be happy to know that it is still in print in paperback.

John Eigenauer can be contacted at jeigenauer@yahoo.com. A complete list of his reviews and more about him can be found here.