In the last post of this installment of the summer anthropologies series, I ended with the point that major league baseball (MLB) is an annual demonstration of autocratic corporate power. If that’s the case, I asked, why would anyone go?

Well, humans are complicated. Take my case. I grew up playing baseball since I was about four or five years old. I played it all the time, went to MLB games when I had the chance, collected baseball cards, played baseball on my own in the backyard and out in the street with my friends. I loved the game. But, as I mentioned in this piece, then the big strike hit in the mid 1990s, and I was done with it. Done. Between 1994 and 2022, I went to exactly one MLB game. One. That was on a road trip with my wife, and we decided, in the middle of a road trip from Kentucky back home to California, to catch a Rockies game in Denver. We ate hotdogs with sauerkraut, watched a great game, and it was super fun. That was around 2010 or so. During that almost thirty year period, I checked up on baseball every now and then, but rarely watched and definitely didn’t give MLB any money (except for that one Rockies game). I was about 19 during that strike in 1994, and I was disgusted by the whole thing. So I just walked away. I went surfing for a few decades instead. I was disgusted by the owners and the players–just all of it. Looking back, some of my views of the politics of the sport were a bit naive, but I stuck to my decision and moved on. I had other things to do. 

It was with all of that in mind that I went to about a dozen games this past season (Giants, A’s, and Dodgers). I know the MLB is problematic. But my oldest kiddo got into baseball this year and, well, we went to some games. As I explained in the opening piece of this little sub-series within a series:

It was nice being back after so long. Things that I’d forgotten about all came back–the sounds, the feel of a packed stadium, the smell of hot dogs, popcorn, and not-so-cheap beer. Baseball was my first love, so it was fun to be back.

Like I said, humans are complicated. I happen to be one of them.

So, why do people still go? Well, to start off, maybe it’s about the beauty of the game. No, really. In the opening of Ken Burns mid 1990s baseball documentary, Bob Costas describes baseball as a “beautiful thing.” Costas talks about the rhythm of the game, the choreography of it all. Sportswriter Robert Creamer calls it a pastime (something you do), entertainment (something you watch), and a shared experience (something you read about and talk about with others). But, most importantly, Creamer says “it’s the best game that’s ever been devised.” He says that baseball is great because it’s just so much fun to watch.

Baseball is fun to watch. I grew up watching the Angels play at the “Big A” in Anaheim, and I’ll never forget it. I loved being at the stadium, hearing all those sounds, seeing that massive green field. I loved getting the chance to see my favorite players right there in front of me. I remember the moment when Bobby Grich threw a ball right to me after a double play during one game. These things stay with you. The feelings of being at a game, the sound of the PA announcer, the food–all of it. That’s why people go. 

But baseball isn’t just about watching. It’s also about playing. As someone who started playing around 4-5 years old and played all the way into High School, I can speak to how fun it was to play. To me baseball has always been like chess–this intricate game with all kinds of possibilities that play out each time. It’s just fun seeing how it all enfolds; you never know. And when I say that baseball is fun to play, I’m not just talking about formal, organized baseball. Playing baseball out in the street or out in the backyard was, honestly, just as fun as any formal game I ever played. I remember all of it, and one of the great things about the game is that you really only need some kind of ball and stick to get a game going. We used everything from real baseballs to tennis balls to those amazing wiffle balls that allowed you to throw massive ten foot curve balls for games. Any of it and all of it. Here I think things get interwoven. Many people watch, I think, because the game itself is fun to play…and it’s amazing seeing people who are really good play the game.

So there we have a few reasons why people still go to games, despite the politics of the sport. I also think it comes down to a whole list of other social reasons, ranging from nostalgia to sheer devotion. Some people go to major league baseball games because it reminds them of childhood, memories of a certain time period, or things they used to do with family, friends, etc. Others go–and keep going–because they are so dedicated that almost nothing could get in the way. So we have the nostalgia seekers, on the one hand, and the fanatics, on the other. And then we have all those regional identities and histories–Dodgers fans, Yankees fans, and so on. In many ways, all of this makes sense. I get it.

Even so, I still have questions. While this behavior makes sense on various levels (memory, nostalgia, habit, fanatic devotion, regional identities), it’s hard to understand on others. Given a choice between a world of options, why would so many people choose to take their hard-earned money and use it to watch millionaires play a game on a field owned by billionaires? Is there something else going on here as well?  

I think David Graeber had some interesting answers for these kinds of questions in his book Utopia of Rules. Games, he explained, whether sports events like baseball or board games like Monopoly, appeal to people precisely because they have clear rules, boundaries, winners, losers, beginnings, and endings. Games are appealing, mostly, because they are so different from everyday life, which is often maddeningly complicated, opaque, and uncertain.

Games are spaces in which participants have to follow rules—and there are clear guidelines, incentives, and penalties in place. Baseball is, of course, jam-packed with lots of intricate rules. The rules keep everything running smoothly. Sure, there’s some room for choice and individual moments of heroism, but everything has to fit within the boundaries of the field and all those rules. This ‘utopia of rules,’ as Graeber calls it, is incredibly appealing for people to watch and enjoy, precisely because it’s such a break from real life, where rules are often so arbitrary and unclear, and (some) people get away with breaking them all the time. It’s nice to watch or participate in something where you know when it starts, when it ends, what can and cannot be done, how one can win or lose, and what will happen if rules are broken. There are even official rule arbitrators right in the middle of the field (umpires) to clarify everything as the game progresses. 

So, then, maybe one reason why people go to baseball games is to see and experience that particular ‘utopia’ as a break from the torrid, unpredictable, and often unfair mess that is everyday life. I don’t know how many people actually think about baseball in that way, but I think it’s plausible that this explains some potential underlying motives. Baseball is an escape, a momentary getaway. Mix that together with all the other reasons (memory, identity, habit, etc) and it makes sense why people go…even with all the politics and corruption. I mean, people need somewhere to go, and they can’t always just build their own games and stadiums. So they seek refuge, respite, and some form of communitas in things massive, pseudo-public spaces like baseball stadiums (and Roman coliseums?). They make life–and memory–in the spaces they have. I think they do this despite the machinations and motivations of the (many) owners who rule over the game, the players, and even the fans as if they are all little more than petty holdings from which to extract as much wealth as possible. Dreams, nostalgia, and memory, in this scenario, are simply more grist for the owners’ mill. 

I think the fans know all this, and they go anyway. I think some could care less about the politics of the game. That’s always going to be part of the picture. But for others, I think they go despite full knowledge of the corruption and politics of the sport. There’s a tenacity within many fanbases–a protest, resistance, or pushback–that tells me that the ‘ownership’ question is actually open for debate. It’s contested ground. I think Graeber is right that the ‘utopia of rules’ has a strong appeal, and people go to such things in search of a break, of respite. But I also think there’s a battle over who rightfully owns and controls that supposed utopia. The owners may rule over franchises, stadiums, merchandise, the league, and all those trademarks, but there’s still so much that’s up for grabs.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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In part one of this installment, I mentioned Leslie White’s call to expand the purview of anthropology and take a closer look at things like baseball. I agree. White’s preliminary theory was that baseball, as a cultural institution, promoted national solidarity and unity: “No matter who you are, what you are, or where you are, if you are a fan you ‘belong.’”

Nope. If you look at the history of baseball at that time, and before, White’s argument about the unifying and integrative power of baseball…just doesn’t hold up. Baseball integrated with Jackie Robinson in 1947, yes, but just like battles for civil rights in the 1960s, issues with race and racism didn’t just magically disappear. Robinson–and those who came after him–dealt with years of discrimination, threats, and abuse. The 1960s were full of all kinds of turmoil, including ongoing racism and bigotry. Hank Aaron didn’t get to stay in the same hotels as his team when he was chasing Babe Ruth’s record in the 1960s. Curt Flood was effectively run out of baseball for challenging the power structure and arguing, in court, that MLB contracts of the time were effectively slavery. Reggie Jackson shared his experiences with ongoing racism in a new documentary. Clearly, baseball continued to have issues in the unity and solidarity departments.

Like many cultural institutions, baseball is contradictory. Yes, it can bring people together…but it reflects the bigotries, divisions, and tensions of society. Of course it does. So how else can we think about what baseball is and what it means? Here I think it’s useful, again, to look back on what was happening in those Roman colosseums. 

In Rome, according to scholars such as Katherine Welch (2007), the violent spectacles in the colosseum were about projecting state power and conditioning Roman citizens to violence, pain, and death. While the often gruesome spectacles that took place in the Colosseum are often assumed to be the result of social and political degradation in Imperial Rome, Welch reminds us that these practices actually developed and flourished in the Roman Republic period. So what was happening in the Colosseum wasn’t just some aberrant behavior; it was a reflection of deeper values and ideologies that had been constructed in Roman society. The spectacles, such as gladiatorial battles, were a way for the Roman State–and later the Emperors–to demonstrate their power via displays of dramatic violence that amazed audiences. 

Baseball games have elements that point to state power, such as the tradition of singing the National Anthem before games and other ‘patriotic’ sorts of displays. But I don’t think state power is the main ideological undercurrent in baseball. So what is going on here? What kinds of ideologies, or values, does baseball instill or promote in its audiences? 

In order to think through these questions it helps to sketch out the general structure of the world of major league baseball. There are 30 teams, each staffed with players, managers, coaches, and other support staff. The owners are a cadre of wealthy businessmen and billionaires who have a long history of running the game in a highly autocratic manner (see Dave Zirin’s Bad Sports and John Helyar’s Lords of the Realm on this point). Importantly, major league baseball operates under an antitrust exemption that allows it to conduct business in ways that have mostly been outlawed since the 19th century. The commissioner, who was in theory supposed to play a sort of mediating role to uphold the norms/ideals of the league, often ends up mostly serving the interests of the owners (the current MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is a good example of this). The players, for their part, are a rare set of athletes who have been able to make playing a child’s game their full-time careers. They are, of course, paid well for doing this, in part because of just how rare they are, and because so many people are willing to pay money to watch them. And that brings us to the fans themselves. All of the money in sports ultimately comes from revenue generated ticket sales, merchandise, licensing, media broadcasting rights, etc. Ultimately, it all comes down to the money that fans (and communities, when it comes to stadium subsidies) are willing to shell out to watch games and buy stuff associated with them. 

So if spectacles in the Colosseum were about projecting state power and conditioning audiences to violence, what’s going on with baseball? I think baseball is more about the celebration and display of market or perhaps corporate power. Think about it. The larger goal, each season, is for one billionaire owner (out of 30) to pull together a team of players that can beat all the rest. It’s sort of this 162 game big man competition, each year, between different corporate franchises. In order to draw in fans, they try to field a team of high-talent, well-paid players who can do amazing things on the field. Owners also try to bring in crowds with all kinds of events, such as fireworks and drone shows. Like the ancient Roman state, the games that take place in stadiums are places where the wealth, power, and savvy of owners is put on display. The whole process is decidedly autocratic and undemocratic, however, since the only ‘choice’ fans truly have is whether they go to games and buy tickets, beers, and bad hot dogs etc. or not. Fans don’t have a say in what happens with teams and players. Such decisions are up to managers, general managers, and ultimately owners.

Ok, but if that’s the case, and baseball really is this autocratic institution that feeds upon fans’ money in what is ultimately just a big annual demonstration of corporate power…why would anyone ever go to a baseball game? Because–and this should not come as a shock coming from an anthropologist–things might be just a bit more complicated.

More about that in part three.

References

Welch, K.E., 2007. The Roman amphitheatre: from its origins to the Colosseum. Cambridge University Press.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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A couple months ago, just after the 2023 baseball season started, I was sitting in the upper deck behind home plate at Oracle Park in San Francisco, California. It is a great view. I was there to watch the Giants play against the Los Angeles Dodgers with about 30,000 or so other people. This was the first MLB game I’d been to in about three decades. It was nice being back after so long. Things that I’d forgotten about all came back–the sounds, the feel of a packed stadium, the smell of hot dogs, popcorn, and not-so-cheap beer. Baseball was my first love, so it was fun to be back.

But of course since I’m an anthropologist, I couldn’t just sit there and enjoy the game. I mean, I did watch the game, but sometimes my mind would drift from what was going on at the plate and I’d look at the big crowd and think about the spectacle and scale of the whole thing. It’s just one more option when you’re at a baseball game: check the infield shift, watch how the pitcher places the 0-2 pitch, and think about the deeper meaning of sports in human history. The usual stuff. Seriously though: baseball stadiums, and all that happens inside them, are a form of public spectacle that can be traced back (at least) to the Colosseums of Rome. It’s all kind of amazing depending on how you look at it. 

Millions of people and billions of dollars are entangled in this thing we call baseball. For some people, baseball is all about money–a lot of it. For others, it’s about the love of the game, family memories, following favorite players, or the important role a certain team plays in community history and identity. There’s a tension between these positions that has shaped the histories of how this sport has developed since the 19th century. It’s a tension that also speaks to larger questions of politics, money, and power that have deep roots in human history. 

The politics of spectacle and violence in the Roman Colosseum is just one strain of a lineage that contemporary baseball derives from. These seem like things that anthropologists would and should study, right? But, as George Gmelch has explained, baseball hasn’t been a big focus in anthropology. Why not?

Well, it clearly relates to anthropology’s long standing tendency to look everywhere else but within. Things have changed, especially since the latter part of the 20th century, but I think this tendency still tends to shape much of the field. Some anthros study baseball, but it hasn’t been a major focus for the discipline. That has changed with the growth of the anthropology of sport in recent years.

Baseball seems like an obvious–and massive—contemporary cultural practice that merits some anthropological analysis. Leslie White recognized this back in the mid 1960s with his call to expand the scope of the field. He mentioned baseball specifically:

It is customary to speak of major league baseball as a sport as if this were an adequate and sufficient characterization of this institution. But is it? It can hardly be called a sport for the men who go out to the ball parks five or six days a week and do hard work for hard cash. Baseball is a fairly big business with relatively high salaries; franchises are bought and sold. Attendance at major league ball park exceeded 21 million in 1962, and countless millions watch games on television or listen to them on radio. During the summer millions upon millions of Americans talk baseball daily. They are intimately acquainted with the player’s achievements: batting averages, pitchers’ records and so on. Virtually everywhere one goes in the United States during the summer one can listen to, and participate in, well informed discussions of the two major leagues and their respective teams. And on some radio stations every news report, morning, and night, includes a full account of the games to be played, or the results of games played, that day. And all this is a part of the news of outstanding world and national events. What is the significance of this? [page 633]

White offers his theory: baseball is a kind of cult or institution that serves to promote national solidarity. If you look at all the patriotism that’s attached to baseball–opening the game with the national anthem and all–he was clearly onto something there. He argues that while other institutions such as religion are ‘divisive rather than integrative’:

…baseball tends to unite everyone in a common fraternity of devotees-or fans. No matter who you are, what you are, or where you are, if you are a fan you ‘belong.’

I think White was onto something but he didn’t take things far enough. And he was off the mark a bit as well. More about that in Part 2.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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Bruce Brown’s mid 1960’s surf epic The Endless Summer is one of the key elements that sparked the global surf tourism industry. It’s a film that set the pattern for how surf tourists have envisioned and engaged with the people and places they travel to and through in search of waves. In The Endless Summer, the non-western world exists as a kind of empty, ahistorical, and naive paradise that awaits the enlightenment of western discovery. 

The film has been taken to task for its loose facts, orchestrated storylines, racism, and blatant colonialist outlook on the non-western world (see the work of Laderman 2014 and West 2014, for starters). There’s one element of the film that I want to discuss here. I think this element plays a key role in perpetuating the kinds of erasures that make The Endless Summer’s fantasies of discovery possible. 

If you watch the film carefully you might notice something. In the opening segment, Brown, who is the film’s narrator, introduces us to several of the main characters. This includes Mike Hynson and Robert August, along with other surfing notables such as Corky Carroll, Lance Carson, and Miki Dora. All of them have names, which isn’t particularly striking. Right? People have names. 

But then Hynson and August depart on their endless summer journey around the world. They start by going to west Africa, making the first three stops in Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria respectively. Suddenly, people don’t have names. Well, some people don’t have names. Mike and Robert have names, but Senegalese, Ghanaian, and Nigerian peoples do not. They become “Africans” and “natives” and are referenced mostly as a group. Individuals only get either generalized names, such as the “Chief”, or sarcastic, condescending names, such as the “Head Rope Coiler” in the coastal Ghanaian segment (which is Labadi Beach, outside of Accra). 

This part of the film has some notoriously derogatory, condescending, and racist segments that dehumanize and exotify local people, including one scene where one of the producers appears in blackface dressed as a ‘native’ who scares the two main protagonists. These scenes reveal the ignorance, biases, and preconceived ideas of Brown and others who were part of this film. On the flight to Senegal, after leaving the US, Brown narrates: “On the plane heading for Africa, Robert wondered what was in store for them. Would they find surf? Would they catch malaria? Would they be speared by a native? He didn’t have any idea.” 

Overall, people in these three countries are depicted as primitive, exotic, distant, and nameless folks who apparently sat, ready and waiting, for the western world to introduce them to new, fashionable things like the world of surfing. But these ‘native’ people aren’t just missing names. There are also repeated claims that coastal African peoples had no experience or knowledge of surfing or wave riding. In Senegal, Mike and Robert paddle out into some surf just outside their hotel, while Brown claims that they have found surf that “noone had ever ridden before, and, as far as we knew, no surfer had ever seen before.” He makes similar claims about the coastal community in Labadi Beach, Ghana. Brown calls it a “primitive fishing village,” and adds that “most of these people had never seen a white man before.” He then goes on to characterize the people as exotic and potentially dangerous: 

As they walked down the beach, they really wondered if they were doing the right thing. Didn’t know whether the UN had been there or not. They were a little nervous on the beach, so they paddled right out in the water. Paddling out, they had the horrible thought that maybe surfing would violate some religious taboo of the natives and they’d attack. 

The local Ghanaian people supposedly break out into cheers after Robert rides his first wave (even though the shot of Robert on a wave and the shot of the crowd are clearly not the same moment, as the wind and water conditions are very different). After this setup, Brown claims, “That was the beginning of surfing in Ghana.” Never mind the fact, for example, that the coastal community in Ghana was clearly adept in the ocean, and, even by Brown’s admission, had a deep history of fishing. They were, after all, a coastal community. There’s also the fact that there are deep histories of swimming, fishing, canoeing, and yes even wave riding that date well, well before the mid 1960s when Brown and his camera crew arrived (see Dawson 2009 and this page, which references the work of anthropologist Ben Finney). The namelessness presages and underlies larger erasures, biases, and fabrications.   

But don’t you worry. The names do come back. When Mike and Robert head to South Africa, they meet up with a community of white surfers that suddenly and miraculously have names again. John Whitmore, the leader of Cape Town’s (white) surfing community, is the first person outside the main cast to be named since the film’s opening segment. The erasure could not be more blatant. 

Given the fact that The Endless Summer was an archetype for surf media and also the growing surf tourism industry, I think a lot about the effects of this film, and particularly how ‘native’ people were portrayed in it. I think about what it means for ensuing generations to follow the model of discovery that’s presented in the film. The search for empty, ahistorical paradises with waves continues to appeal to millions of people, who hope to experience a similar sense of ‘discovery’ that Mike, Robert, and Bruce Brown did in the mid 1960s. Such desires take surf tourists to new destinations, whether Costa Rica, Panama, or Papua New Guinea (see West 2014 on the latter). 

Erasure sets the stage for these desires and the supposed discoveries that follow. Those ‘discoveries’ rest upon hopes and assumptions about pristine, empty landscapes, uncomplicated by the politics of history or the inconvenience of previous human experience (and occupation). But what kind of ‘discovery’ is really happening here? West (2014) argues that:

Claims of discovery are really at their base political claims. There is no real discovery going on. By claiming to have discovered something, you are editing out the people who live in a place from your representations of that place and thus attempting to disempower them. This disempowerment, this erasure of people from sea- and landscapes, leads to the fantasy of these sites as empty and therefore open to transformation by outsiders.

One way to disempower and dispossess, in the case of land, is to ignore the names that already exist and to proclaim new ones. Naming is conquest and erasure all at once. Such practices were common throughout the period of colonialist expansion. Another way to disempower and dispossess, as seen in The Endless Summer, is to erase, ignore, or simply dismiss the names of the people themselves–in this case very selectively. This aspect of the film speaks volumes about who is considered human, and worthy of recognition, and who is not. It seems to me that Brown and his crew would have had to meet and work with various individuals while making the segments in Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria. So the choice to avoid naming anyone seems rather deliberate. 

In the end it speaks to deeper issues about relationships–or a complete lack thereof. One way to humanize people is not just to learn their names, but to develop a relationship with them in which we are granted the honor of using those names. There’s humanity and respect in recognition, in learning about people’s knowledge and experience, and in taking the time to develop mutual understanding. In Brown’s Endless Summer, such considerations and concerns only extend so far, and they end, abruptly, on the shores of west Africa. And so the nameless masses become mere backdrops for surf desire and discovery. It’s a pattern, derived from an early mold, and based in (willful) ignorance and exotification, that continues to shape surf tourism today. Breaking such patterns requires, at minimum, a willingness to set assumptions aside, listen to people, and recognize them as something more than mere decorative, interesting objects for surf stories.

References

Dawson, K., 2009. Swimming, surfing, and underwater diving in early modern Atlantic Africa and the African diaspora. Navigating African maritime history, pp.136-154.

Laderman, S., 2014. Empire in waves: A political history of surfing. University of California Press.

West, P., 2014. “Such a site for play, this edge”: surfing, tourism, and modernist fantasy in Papua New Guinea. The Contemporary Pacific, 26(2), pp.411-432.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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