Chris Rock and Baseball’s Decline
There’s a new video for HBO’s Real Sports in which Chris Rock, one of the funniest comedians of all time, narrates some of the reasons he thinks baseball is declining. He ties the decline to race and that “blacks have abandoned baseball.” But is he correct, or is the decline in baseball a much more serious and widespread phenomenon?
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFFQkQ6Va3A[/embed]
Rock couches his own fandom in the ’86 Mets, one of the slew of “bad boy” teams that in-part defined the sports landscape of the late ’70s through early ’90s. Other examples were the Raiders, the Pistons, and the Miami Hurricanes. It’s an interesting hiccup in sports history and one we’ve actively tried to tackle in AM ST 441 this semester. Divesting the teams from the media portrayal of the teams, however, has been challenging. Most of these teams were actively marketed as “bad” and embraced it, integrating it into their personality and performed identity.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDFa4BChz5w[/embed]
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aII7sXXU638[/embed]
These teams weren’t “bad” because they were losing, but rather because they were winning — and winning “with attitude”. This fits into a larger cultural trend toward glorifying the anti-hero. In movies, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford developed this; in music, this was the punk and hip-hop scenes; in sports, it was Isaiah Thomas and, of course, John McEnroe:
As Rock says in the video, he liked the Mets not because he liked the game of baseball, per se, but because he liked the team, the cast of characters: Doc Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, etc. So what Rock is really identifying in today’s game is the lack of identifiable characters, which he is exclusively defining in racial terms. But is that really true or is that simply the effect of an overall decline in the game’s popularity in general? Is it that baseball is declining in its appeal to black folks or is it that baseball is declining for everyone? Stats reflect the latter… black participation in baseball is down (from 20% to 8% according to Rock’s monologue), but overall participation in baseball down among every group across the country. Baseball itself was “replaced” by football as the most popular sport at far back at the mid-80s.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-IV_gYKZPw[/embed]
Moreover, baseball has directly suffered from the economic success of both football and basketball. The TV contracts aside, the economic appeal of becoming a professional baseball player — despite having some of the highest salaries in pro sports — has vanished.
While a baseball career will take you through a maze of minor league teams and towns, offering little stability and little fame and fortune, the career paths for football and basketball are much more direct. For football, a standout high school player is rewarded with an academic scholarship and the potential to be drafted on live TV and sign a contract worth millions of dollars by the time he is 21.
In basketball it’s even shorter, with one-and-done making million dollar contracts available to 18 and 19 year olds. Add in sponsorship and endorsement deals, and from a pure career-planning viewpoint, if you’re interested in become a rich and famous athlete, baseball is your worst choice of America’s big three.
Rock does highlight some serious issues with the current dynamic — like Howard “the Harvard of black colleges” — getting rid of their baseball program altogether. To me, this is all becoming a self-fulfilling cycle, however: the less kids that play baseball, the less baseball programs that can successfully operate, meaning there are less opportunities for baseball to expand.
This is a terrible trajectory for a game that was at the forefront of creating and shaping American culture. A game that (arguably) healed cultural fissures in the wake of the Civil War, a game that Twain called “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!”
Baseball is a game that integrated the country, through the photography work of Charles Conlon which normalized the visual identity of immigrant players in the 1920s, and of course, the integration of black athletes from the Negro leagues. When American society changed, we saw it reflected in baseball. I, for one, don’t like the implication then of accepting the impending death of baseball…
While Rock is placing this conversation in explicitly racial terms — “lacrosse is black enough for Howard, but not baseball” — I think he’s confusing the issue. In my opinion, baseball isn’t declining because it isn’t appealing to black youth and fans, it’s declining because it isn’t appealing to a large majority of all youth and fans.
Perhaps Rock’s critique can give us an answer, though. Maybe baseball just needs some more characters, some more Nolan Ryan, some more Willie Mays, some more Roberto Clemente… baseball needs to recapture the style, the charisma, and the attitude of its past, not just the affectations like organ music, “bullshit, fake antique stadium,” and throwback jerseys. There’s nothing about the game itself that is turning off fans (in fact, part of Rock’s critique is that the game hasn’t changed), as much as the marketing and performance of the game in popular culture.
As much as Derek Jeter is respected and honored and beloved (at least according to some), to survive, maybe the game needs less Jeter and more Ricky Vaughn.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mi3KNEpbA4[/embed]
Even you, Dorn.
