Schad wrote:Baseball was also more of a product of cities then; it was a sport learned in streets by kids with a stick and ball as much as in a cornfield. But most of all, it was by and large (like soccer in Europe and South America) a sport that captured the interest of poor kids, whether urban or rural, because of the ease with which one could play some form of it.
Racial animus is definitely a big part of it. There's also a socioeconomic aspect; like hockey, in North America it's very much a game of the suburbs now. Land's too expensive to throw up ball fields all over the place in urban areas, and it's generally frowned upon to stand around in streets, never mind bang a ball off buildings for hours at a time. You pay to have your kid on a good travel team, maybe pay for specialized coaching, pay for room and board and travel for the Cod if your kid is good, and unless you're a high draft pick, it really helps if your family can afford to support you, because you aren't getting rich in the minors. The poor farmboy from Indiana and the poor son of immigrants from NYC had more shared experiences than the upper-middle-class kid from The Woodlands and the kid from La Romana who lived at a Dominican academy (private first, then team-run) from the age of 12 before coming stateside.
Schad going full Ken Burns now
Totally agree, of course, and the east coast was where most of those cities were, so that's exactly what I meant. A shame, really, that we'll never see that sort of shared experience again, as the country back then was still industrializing and building its nascent national identity (which is why baseball was able to become part of that intial lore), whereas now it's heavily stratified in myriad ways.
All the same, assimilation is actually happening both ways. Part of the reason a player like Bud Norris is so vocal nowadays is because his kind is decline, as every clubhouse is bi-lingual, with many more gringos learning Spanish than ever before. The era of the Bud Norris' is in its last throes.
Black Watch and Hamyltowne, my former usernames, are tartan patterns. Nothing to do with any race or any city.