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Baseball9111.pptLecture 9:
The Fan and the Future
The Fan and the Future
Originally called “cranks,” another term for “madman” whose origin dates to Charles Guiteau’s assassination of President Garfield in 1881 and later applied to the baseball faithful who attended games to cheer for their teams, the word fan is alleged to have been derived from “fanatic,” an assumption that has been disproved. But whether fan or fanatic, the baseball enthusiast is in many ways the real heart and soul of the game.
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The Fan Through Baseball History
From Boston’s “Nuf Sed” McGreevey and the Royal Rooters from his Roxbury tavern (above left) who cheered on the Boston Red Sox in the first world series played in that city in 1903 to Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan who filled that same role in 2004.
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The Fan in 1919
“I traded off the Risberg bat, so languid had I become, for a softball model autographed only by the Klee Brothers, who were giving such bats away with every suit of boy’s clothing bought on the second floor. And [I] flipped the program from that hot and magic Sunday when Cicotte was shutting out everybody forever…into the Troy Street gutter. I guess that was one way of learning what Hustlertown, sooner or later, teaches all its sandlot sprouts. ‘Everybody’s out for The Buck. Even big-leaguers.’ Even Swede Risberg.”
Nelson Algren from “Chicago: City on the Make”
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Nelson Algren
Reminiscing about 1919 as he attends the first game of the 1959 World Series, the first in which the White Sox appeared since 1919 and which they lost in six games to the Los Angeles Dodgers, Algren writes: “Then on that last afternoon of summer I saw Shoeless Joe Jackson leave his glove in left field, walk toward the darkening stands and never come back for his glow.” Forty years later, as Algren leaves Comiskey Park after the last game of the Series, he remarks, “when the crowd was gone and I stood up to leave, I saw the shade of Shoeless Joe.” Algren left the ballpark as a light drizzle fell, his body and spirit dampened.”
James T. Farrell
James T. Farrell, another Chicagoan and the author of the celebrated Studs Lonigan trilogy, was also deeply hurt by the Black Sox scandal.
Farrell
“For years,” Farrell concedes, “I had no favorite team. I was growing up and this marked the end of my days of hero-worshipping baseball players. Many fans felt betrayed. I didn’t. I wished it weren’t true. I wished the players had been given another chance.”
From James T. Farrell, My Baseball Diary.
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Farrell
In “My Baseball Diary,” Farrell writes how in 1920 he stood near the steps coming down from the White Sox clubhouse as Lefty Williams, Happy Felsch and Joe Jackson appeared. “A few fans called to them,” Farrell writes, “but they gave no acknowledgment to these greetings. They turned and started to walk away. Spontaneously, the crowd followed in a slow, disorderly manner. I went with the crowd and trailed about five feet behind Jackson and Felsch. They walked somewhat slowly. A Fan called out: ‘It ain’t true, Joe.’ The two suspected players did not turn back. They walked on slowly….Soon Felsch and Jackson drove out in the sportive roadsters, through a double line of silent fans.”
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The Fan
“’The Reds didn’t win the Series,’ Uncle Dave said. ‘The Sox gave it to them.’….’I know how you feel’ [he told me], and then he left, closing the door behind him….[Later though], by making his own deductions from figures…he concluded that ‘The Reds would have won anyway. Remember that. The Reds would have won anyway.’ My Uncle Dave was an able man with percentages, and I have never seen any reason to question his interpretation of those he sent me. As a result, I suppose I am one of the few baseball fans in the country who are still convinced that the Reds were the real champions in 1919.”
James A. Maxwell from “Shine Ball”
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A Loss of Innocence
Perhaps it is because the 1919 scandal rocked what so many believed was the sacred American game that the event stays with us still, as much in our consciousness even, as Richard Nixon’s Watergate. As the White Sox were playing in the 1959 Series, another scandal, this time involving television quiz shows which had become a veritable American obsession, as much as even today’s reality shows, President Dwight Eisenhower compared it to the 1919 Series noting, in the words, of historian Stephen Whitfield, that “not since….1919 had there been so widespread a sense of violation of public faith.”
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The Shot Heard Round the World
“This is people’s history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old safe game of ours. And fans at the Polo Grounds today will be able to tell their grandchildren-they’ll be the gassy old men leaning into the next century and trying to convince anyone willing to listen, pressing in with medicine breath, that they were here when it happened.”
From Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” on Bobby Thompson’s home run in the 1951 Giant-Dodger playoff series.
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More on the Fan
“Happy the man in the bleachers. He is enjoying the spectacle that the Gods on Olympus contrived only with difficulty when they sent Helen to Troy and picked their teams.” – Jacques Barzun
“Time is of the essence. The crowd and players
Are the same age always, but the man in the crowd
Is older every season. Come on, play ball! - Rolfe Humphries
“The crowd lives the action of the players more than in any other game. It is a release and something of a purge. It is the next best thing to participation.” – Paul Gallico
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More on the Fan
“From time to time, a wild and sudden cheer breaks sharply from the waiting crowd, as sometimes happens to increase their hope of victory, but for the most part they are tense and silent now, all waiting for the instant crisis, the quick end.” – Thomas Wolfe
“As he passed through the center gate with the other stragglers of the crowd he thought he saw, ahead of him, the old fellow who had sat beside him during the first game. Wonder where he’s been. And so out into the dirty street under the elevated tracks. And home.”
-William Carlos Williams
“From that day on I was completely through with any and all hopes and dreams of becoming a big-time ballplayer….I began a hunt for new secret ambitions, but they were slow in coming.” – Carl Sandburg
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More on the Fan
“As for the local color, the only bit we saw was around the neck of a spectator in a large white hat….The rooter said his name was Tom Mix but offered no other explanation.” – Heywood Broun
“Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder – and nothing more.” – Philip Roth
“I never feel more at home in America than at a ball game be it in a park or in sandlot. Beyond this I know not. And dare not.” – Robert Frost
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More on the Fan
“She [my grandmother] kept going to Ladies Day games on into the middle 1920’s, and invariably, she came home excited and happy. And she never deserted the Bostons. They always remained her favorites. She loved baseball and understood absolutely nothing about the game.” – James T. Farrell
“My soul lusts for the season like a politician lusts for November.” – Joel Oppenheimer
“Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports….I am a simpler creature tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well as that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.” – Bart Giamatti
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The Infamous Bartman
Normally a home team’s 10th man, on occasion a fan becomes even more reviled than a player whose error costs a team a game or even a season. Indeed, poor Steve Bartman, as loyal a fan who ever entered Chicago’s “friendly confines,” may never again be allowed to attend a Cubs game.
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Red Sox Nation
“Either you were born into the Red Sox, you were swept away by them, or you inherited them the same way people inherit baldness and high blood pressure. Inevitably “ you passed them down to the next generation. You hoped everything would be worth it some day…even if all evidence pointed to the contrary. You hoped. You hoped. You hoped. [And] yes, I would be raising my child as a Red Sox fan.”
From Bill Simmons’ “Now I Can Die in Peace”
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Now I Can Die in Peace
This phrase, coined by ESPN’s Bill Simmons, sums up the feeling of most members of “Red Sox Nation” that the Red Sox World Series victory in 2004 belonged to them much more than to the players. And they were right!
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Who Can Die In Peace?
What’s really remarkable about the whole issue of the famous “Curse of the Bambino” was that it had nothing whatever to do with the Red Sox team in 2004 and at any other time – even when Bill Buckner let Mookie Wilson’s ground ball roll through his legs in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Rather it was the creation of Boston Globe sportswriter, Dan Shaughnessy who wrote a book of that name which became a sort of Red Sox fan cult item.
The Friendly Confines
Now that the Red Sox and White Sox have won World Series, only the benighted Chicago Cubs remained to deal with a century of failed hopes and dreams. At the Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field, hope does spring eternal and virtue was rewarded in 2016!
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