Summer is just dawning, but America’s pastime is already in full swing — not baseball itself, but the long-standing tradition of lamenting its death at the hands of ruthless corporate modernity.
This week’s inciting incident was the Boston Red Sox trading homegrown slugger and World Series champion Rafael Devers to the San Francisco Giants, something team president Sam Kennedy defended in awkwardly bloodless terms as “in the absolute best interest of the ballclub.” The fans disagreed: Dean of Boston sports fandom and Ringer founder Bill Simmons lamented a “special team that’s NOT special” to its ownership anymore, while one fan raged to ESPN senior writer Buster Olney that the Sox are “not even a real organization” after jettisoning not just Devers but megastars Mookie Betts (now a Los Angeles Dodger) and Xander Bogaerts (now a San Diego Padre).
To some extent, these pleas ring a bit hollow. Boston sports fans are among the most literally entitled of the 21st century, with the Red Sox enjoying four titles since 2000, the NBA’s Boston Celtics snagging two, the NHL’s Bruins one, and Tom Brady’s New England Patriots, in nearby Foxboro, Massachusetts, six Super Bowl wins across a dominant, nearly 20-year run. Complaints about the hollow, money-grubbing nature of Major League Baseball predate even the 1994 players’ strike that most fans credit as the sport’s moment of lost innocence.
But one must give the devil — and the city that appears as such to pretty much every sports fan outside greater eastern Massachusetts — his due. Simmons’s complaint and that of Olney’s unnamed fan register on a deeper level than the common materialist criticism of major league sports in the 21st century.
Modern sports franchises might want your money, but they can only get it because they already have your soul. The financialized takeover of pro sports is an effect, not a cause, of their death as the locus of communitarian pride. When someone like Simmons calls the team “not special” to its ownership, he’s pointing out that the Sox’s ownership knows all too well that they’ll make gobs of money regardless of their fanbase’s response to such a cold-blooded move. Like what happened to the Rotary Club or the small-town mainline Protestant church, the 20th-century conception of what sports “mean” has passed into cultural abstraction while the institution lumbers on.
A poignant example of this comes from one of the sport’s most unlikely successes. The Savannah Bananas, on the surface, would seem to be an even more archaic phenomenon than your grandfather’s inherited Pittsburgh Pirates fanaticism: a barnstorming exhibition baseball team, playing small university and recreational fields. In 2018, the team invented “Banana Ball,” an extensively choreographed combination of amateur baseball and musical theater — think baseball’s answer to the Harlem Globetrotters, with a hefty dose of viral TikTok-style dancing antics.
Since then, the Bananas have become a legitimate cultural phenomenon. The team plans to tour 40 cities this year, including sold-out appearances at the NFL’s 65,000-capacity Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, and Clemson University’s 80,000-capacity “Death Valley.” ESPN and Disney+ will broadcast their games. Unlike the Globetrotters, the outcomes of the Bananas’ games aren’t scripted, but they don’t matter even remotely. The highlights are the point, with the can-you-believe-there’s-a-guy-on-stilts novelty and schmaltzy feel-good celebrations of the team’s fans eclipsing any actual competition.
For the sports purist, the rise of the Bananas is an ill omen. Athletics, dating back to the classical era, are meant to test people’s character in a Platonic vacuum, where sheer concentration, instinct, and skill are tested against the objective criteria sorely lacking from the rest of modern life. Professional baseball has done more than any other sport to mock that ideal. Lacking a salary cap, the MLB now resembles Formula One racing more than any of its “big four” peers in American sports, boasting franchises with bottomless pockets (the LA Dodgers and New York’s two teams, for example) that monopolize the sport’s elite-level talent and leave their competitors with barely a chance.
With “official” baseball presenting such a meager facade of competition, never mind actual fun, it’s hard to blame the Bananas’ boosters for being drawn to non-competitive novelty more than the “official” baseball product. The 162-game MLB season, more than anything else in modern American sports, is a relic of 20th-century media — a slow, grinding, iterative schedule meant to stimulate ritual conversation around the diner counter or water cooler rather than to create highlights or social media discourse.
Professional baseball has become dour, wonky, and mercenary. Its biggest boosters are either the working-class inheritors for whom giving up a fandom is as unthinkable as giving up lip service to their parents’ religion, or the number-crunching true believers who think, via Michael Lewis’ seminal Moneyball, the sport can be redeemed through empirical cleverness. High-profile fans such as the Sox’s Simmons find themselves in an awkward position, righteously yet pointlessly raging against institutions that are simply following the way of the world, chasing an abstract slice of the global economic pie while almost always spurning the hometown fan.
If the “special,” familial conception of sports fandom that the Red Sox’s critics are decrying has any future, it might be like that of the aforementioned religion: as a quiet inheritance, chosen for nothing else but the sake of private belief and familial continuity.
Another possible path, however, has improbably emerged in Sacramento, California, the site of one of this era’s most egregious corporate sports degradations: the temporary housing of the Oakland Athletics as they plan for their relocation to Las Vegas.
Sacramento’s team wears jerseys that merely say “Athletics”; their broadcast abbreviation is “ATH”; the team’s ownership has forbidden them from stamping their jersey or public presence with the city’s name. Still, adults and children stubbornly dedicated to the spirit of their city show up at the ersatz that MLB stadium ownership has propped up on the site of its already-existing minor league team, ready to cheer on transient players for nothing other than their shared willingness to be there.
To expect the team’s ownership to repay that favor in any meaningful way is surely too much. But if any kind of deeply felt, civic-minded competitive spirit is to revive itself in the American heart, it will come from the obstinate belief of fans like those in Sacramento, that their team, and what they do on the field, matters beyond either a profit and loss statement or an ephemeral TikTok highlight.
Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.