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By Nathan Bierma


Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

April 2003

This Week:

AN ESCAPE TO CHICAGO'S FIELD OF DREAMS

"Have a good day," bids the bank teller, and I decide not to tell him how much better a day I expect to have than he will. While he remains in indoor confines on a summer-like afternoon, I will be in the Friendly Confines, soaked by sunshine. It's quarter to noon on a Tuesday, and I am off to Wrigley Field on a flawless 80-degree day in mid-April.

Such recreational indulgence while the rest of society dutifully labors reminds me of what historians say about baseball: that the game caught on at the turn of the twentieth century as agrarian compensation for urbanization—a sanctuary of grass and play relieving spectators from the noise and grime of their factories. This pastoral imperative endures in a very different age, to alleviate the monotony of our increasingly technological working lives. Indeed, of all of our Lord's commands we disobey, surely one of the most grievously ignored in a frenzied society is his mandate to rest. Consider the source: Christ had a mere three years into which to cram his ministry, and yet in the Bible, he's continually stealing away for a nap on the boat. I imagine him today idling off the shore of Lake Michigan. A mile away, Wrigley Field beckons as the next best thing.

I want to offer this reassurance to the man behind me on the Red Line as it wriggles toward Wrigley. "I'm going to a Cubs game," he announces into his cell phone. After a presumed groan on the other end of the line, he chuckles but gets defensive: "It's not my tickets! I found out about it at 7:30 this morning. I'm wearing dress pants and an Oxford shirt. At least I don't have my tie on."

I spill with the crowd out of the train and onto Addison Avenue, into a chorus of barking scalpers, past the statue of Harry Caray on the corner, which venerates the play-by-play legend whose exuberance for the Cubs was as unmistakable as his saucer-sized eyeglasses—the man's very name exults "Hooray!" Around the stadium, on Waveland, I find a dozen frozen men staring at the back wall of the park, ball gloves on their hips, in a trance. Their idleness catches my eye amid the streams of people, and I realize they are waiting for home runs from batting practice to wing their way. I sit on the curb and eat my lunch under their protection as they snare each fugitive fly ball.

Inside, the grounds crew fusses over the field like a cartoonist bent over an easel. They douse the infield to stifle its dust, turning the sand the color of cappuccino. Wrigley's most famous lawn ornament—the ivy that crawls the outfield walls-is still brown and scraggly in early spring, like a hairdo in the morning. My hair will soon match it as the wind whips eastward over me in the upper deck. It unfurls the red, white and blue flags lining the roof, testaments to sustained futility, each marking a year long ago when the Cubs—imagine! —won the pennant.

The crowd's first stirring roar drowns out the last bars of the national anthem and rouses my resting heart-rate. Sammy Sosa is the first to spring out of the dugout; he sprints toward his right field post as though pursued by a bee and hoists his fist to the right field bleachers. Among today's desultory ballplayers, who play with all the passion of a tax accountant and are equally preoccupied with annual income, Sammy is a joyous exception. The bounce in his step expresses his contagious gratitude for being in such a ballpark on such a day.

Soon I float out of my seat when Sosa slaps a shot toward left-center and the wind deposits it over the wall for his 501st career home run and a 1-0 Cubs lead. (Baseball fans, like a congregation at the opening hymn, always rise in unison when the ball is hit deep, as though there were an unspoken ban on sedentary observation of a homer.) It turns out I have picked a particularly prolific game of Sosa's to watch, like eating in the office lounge on the one day somebody brought doughnuts. He finishes with a homer, two doubles, and 3 RBIs.

It may be as trite as it is irreverent to say that baseball is good for the soul, especially during Holy Week, but it seems to be no coincidence that both baseball and the Christian calendar schedule rebirth for springtime, when the revitalized air gives new breath to faith. As Steve Rushin rhymed in a spring training poem in Sports Illustrated: "Spring, however, keeps us hopeful / Faithwise, Cubs fans have a Popeful."

Easter is when we realize that our most crooked angles are somehow realigned by a power greater than our own, which is how the infield sand must feel as the grounds crew sweeps away its blemishes between innings. For that matter, have we wrestled with every aspect of the word "forgiveness" until we ponder the answer to today's scoreboard trivia question about which Cub won the team batting title in 1980? It was Bill Buckner, who would go on to crush spirits on another island of perpetual baseball disappointment, with an infamous error for the Boston Red Sox that thwarted a thirsted-for World Series championship.

And yet, like Easter, baseball tantalizes us with the promise of a future victory that animates the present. "Next Year's Here!" replies a beer billboard in right field to that axiom of Cubs fans: Wait till next year. Baseball is the only sport in which each day brings a new game and yet another second chance; the Cubs lost 11-3 to the Reds yesterday, their seventh straight loss to Cincinnati at Wrigley Field, before nearly reciprocating that score with today's 11-1 victory. And, tugging at the dimensions of our belief, the Cubs, today at least, are in first place.

DIALOGUE: ECONOMICS OF SPORTS STADIUMS

In their new book, It's Hardly Sportin': Stadiums, Neighborhoods, and the New Chicago, Costas Spirou, associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at National-Louis University in Chicago, and Larry Bennett, political science professor at DePaul University, examine the economic context of professional sports franchises in post-industrial urban America, focusing on three case studies involving stadium construction in Chicago neighborhoods. I sat down with them to ask them about general trends in the business of sports.

Books & Culture: You write that professional sports represents one of the "culture industries" that has become "a key survival tool for cities." How did this come about?

Costas Spirou: As our society evolved in the 1960s and 70s we experienced deindustrialization and decentralization. As the economy started to shift we observed the effort to try to revitalize cities via urban renewal programs, but as we move past this, cities are losing their economic identity and new forms of urban redevelopment emerge. In a service-oriented post-industrial economy—though manufacturing does remain as an aspect of our economy—cities are reorganizing themselves to look to culture as a form of urban redevelopment. These culture industries would include the arts and museums and tourism, and sports becomes part of the new agenda.

Larry Bennett: I think there was kind of a stumbling into the idea of using cultural resources or using entertainment or sports as something that could spur the local economy. I think initially some of it was really more symbolic than anything else-this idea that if our city loses these franchises it will indicate that we're no longer a "major league city." At some point I think there became an even more sophisticated view that … sports could even be part of a residential gentrification process-not just bringing tourists in but actually rehabilitate neighborhoods on the basis of having some of these [sports] institutions.

B&C: You write that sports owners' promises of providing a boost to a city's economy are usually overstated. Why do their views differ from reality?

LB: Owners characteristically overestimate their economic impact. I'm not saying that they necessarily understand how limited their economic impact is. They're running a fairly large organization with a fairly significant payroll. They see they balance statement and say, Well, this must be quite a big increment of economic activity for the metropolitan area. The fact is, a lot of the spending is spending that would go elsewhere in the metropolitan area; what professional sports does is undermine the movie theaters in a metropolitan area, because people would be spending their money on that if they weren't going to sports events. So the added piece to the local economy, the economists seem to suggest, isn't very big. But I'm sure most of the owners believe it's very large, they aren't just sort of blowing smoke when they call for a subsidy.

CS: Studies have shown actually that a major league team generates revenue, [but] its impact is equivalent to a large department store, versus the over-100-million dollar economic impact studies that we recorded in our book about the White Sox and the Cubs that were discussed. Those become tools to sell the idea to the public and use that as a right to pass through legislation that write off the construction of the facilities. …

The challenge is that you have a situation of supply and demand in terms of how many teams do you have out there that are major league and how many cities are out there. Owners tie the desire on the part of the cities to be considered a big-league city, to ascend that ladder … to have a great return on their investment.

B&C: Some people would say it's misguided to harken back to any supposed golden era when it was just a game, that sports has always been about the buck. The Brooklyn Dodgers were ripped out of Brooklyn in the 50s to move to greener pastures, and even the former namesake for the Chicago White Sox's stadium, Charles Comiskey, was such a miserly character that some people blame him for the Black Sox scandal of 1919. Is there a qualitative difference in commercial ambition in sports today?

CS: There has been a shift between mom-and-pop operations and the current [situation]. We quote Isiah Thomas of the Toronto Raptors saying, 'I don't see Raptors as just a basketball team.' [The rest of the quote is: "I see them as one day being the centerpiece of an entertainment entity. Our intention is to make this a $1 billion company. Even now our corporate culture is to create an environment in every division similar to what Disney has done."]

This corporatization that has happened in sport-you have Disney owning Mighty Ducks and the Angels [note: Disney sold the Angels last week and is also looking to dump the Ducks], the Tribune Company owning the Cubs—corporations are looking into sport purely for its finance, whether it's media [opportunities], or what's on the field. Once that happens, a team is no different than selling coffee or something like that—it's a corporate entity. So the drive for profit has intensified.

LB: [Historically], the [sports] institutions that generated the most loyalty were closely identified with individuals. … There was a way that people who had factory jobs or who worked as store clerks could invest some psychic energy in these enterprises. I don't mean to simply say that they were better because they were more personalized. But I think that there was a formation of institutional loyalties, a sort of popular support for institutions that stand for a long period of time. As capitalism became increasingly a matter of very concentrated corporate forces, its ability to produce institutions the way they had been produced in earlier generations has been somewhat lost.

Take the example of the Great American Ballpark, if that's what they're calling it in Cincinnati. What a brilliantly stupid idea. … A public relations person has been hired and given quite a bit of money to come up with some sort of warm-sounding sports stadium name which will generate loyalty. Maybe it will, but the likelihood is it's going to be a kind of civic joke in Cincinnati: Why did they come up with this? There's clearly a way in which corporate owners of sports franchises seek to generate loyalty, but the techniques they use probably alienate people more than anything else because they're so clearly aimed at trying to create a market niche.

As opposed to even Charley Comiskey, the tight-fisted guy who did want to have a winning team, and maybe spending more money would have been a more direct way to have a winning team, but there was a personality there, and that's something that's very substantially lost in sports. …

Baseball's problem is that so much is devoted now to marketing its history. It's a sport in which there are fewer kids that play baseball, there is less interest in baseball among younger people, it has a serious race problem; it is not followed particularly by African Americans. A lot of this stuff that's going on in baseball now is an attempt to market its history because its contemporary presence doesn't have the kind of reach to people that professional football or some other sports have.

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Washington Post:

NEUQUEN, Argentina—This is where the wild things are, dead but not gone, in Argentina's breathlessly beautiful Patagonian desert. Patagonia is the world's most plentiful source of animal and plant fossils from the Cretaceous Period, the prehistoric time that followed the Jurassic Period. … Tourists from 28 countries have visited this site since it opened in February 2001, part of a growing segment of Argentina's travel industry dubbed "dino-tourism." Relying more on word of mouth than on advertising, the Patagonian circuit of excavation sites, museums and prehistoric parks has begun to capitalize on its buried treasures, attracting tens of thousands of domestic and foreign tourists to this remote, southernmost region with guided tours, camping trips, and even pajama parties for children. … It's been more than a decade since Argentina welcomed as many tourists as it has in the past year.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26709-2003Apr14.html

BOSTON—It may have looked like an ordinary cocktail hour, but Whiskey Park was on the brink of a spontaneous social revolution. Dawn Franklyn is black. Her friends are black. And by late evening, more than 100 other black patrons had transformed the downtown bar, which typically caters to an upscale, mostly white crowd. "I don't meet any black professionals downtown, but I don't feel we should leave," said Franklyn, a 27-year-old accountant, as she nursed an $11 apple martini. … Welcome to the "Friendly Takeover," a sporadic event engineered by local software developer Reggie Cummings to help promote and integrate a city with a tumultuous record on race relations. Via last-minute e-mails, Cummings invites a select group of black professionals essentially to crash Boston venues that need—as he puts it—"a little bit of color." They include places from the chic nightspot Vox Populi to the Frog Pond ice rink on Boston Common.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36911-2003Apr5.html

DIGEST

For links with an * you can log in with member name and password of "bcread"

  • Whether or not you think invading Iraq was a good idea-and Michael Kinsley doesn't-one historical aspect of it is beyond debate, Kinsley says in Time. The buildup and decision to go to war was the product of one person, President Bush. This throws a curve at historians who favor social tides when making causal explanations and downplay the impact of acts of personal will, including the "great man" theory of leadership. "War on Iraq was optional," Kinsley writes. "[Bush] could have easily chosen not to have it, in which case it wouldn't have happened, but when he decided to have it, that was it: we had it."
    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030421-443202,00.html

Also:

- One of the biggest differences between Gulf War's I and II was the ascent of women to combat positions in time for the latest conflict, writes Phillip Carter in the Washington Monthly.
- The war went exactly as planned, writes Gregg Easterbrook in The New Republic online.*
- Nothing went according to plan, writes Jim Lacey in Time.
- Syria could be "Cakewalk II," writes Fred Kaplan in Slate.
  • Few countries have pursued market reform over the last 15 years as assiduously as New Zealand, which has deregulated, privatized, and slashed subsidies with zeal that would make Reagan and Thatcher proud. Did it work? Rupert Darwall evaluates the New Zealand economics experiment in Policy Review.
    http://www.policyreview.org/apr03/darwall.html
  • "Why should all those immense spaces of the heavens above the clouds be incapable of inhabitants?" Sir Isaac Newton wondered this three centuries before the dawn of space rovers, writes Tim Radford in the London Guardian. In June, separate landers launched by Europe and the U.S. will comb Mars looking for microscopic signs of life. Long past the days of imagining little green men on the Red Planet, a new science called "astrobiology" is driving space exploration.
    www.guardian.co.uk/spacedocumentary/story/0,2763,937999,00.html
  • If higher education exists to bring out the best in us, why is it that the frenzy of college admissions tends to bring out the worst in everyone involved—especially colleges? The current affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court are just the tip of an iceberg of doubts about how level the college admissions playing field is, writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand in the New Yorker. "Merit, defined as quantifiable aptitude and achievement, is just one of the variables that decide educational outcomes," he writes. "Success in college admissions, as in almost every sphere of life, is a function of some combination of ability, connections, persistence, wealth, and special markers—that is, attributes valued for the difference they make to 'the mix.'"
    http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030407crat_atlarge

Also:

- James Fallows' seminal Atlantic Monthly article on early decision policies in college admissions.
- My story in the Chicago Tribune on the controversies surrounding the college admissions process, and what demographics have to do with it.*
- Why do salaries of female professors lag behind those of males? A forum from the Chronicle of Higher Education online.
  • The New Yorker reports the average cost of an American wedding has topped $22,000; the newsweeklies wonder what went right in Iraq; and more from Slate's "In Other Magazines."
    http://slate.msn.com/id/2081468

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.

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