Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity During the War on Terror

By Michael L. Butterworth

An investigation into the culture and mythology of baseball, a study of its limits and failures, and an invitation to remake the game in a more democratic way
 

Baseball has long been considered America’s “national pastime,” touted variously as a healthy diversion, a symbol of national unity, and a model of democratic inclusion. But, according to Michael Butterworth, such favorable rhetoric belies baseball’s complicity in the rhetorical construction of a world defined by good and evil. 

Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity is an investigation into the culture and mythology of baseball, a study of its limits and failures, and an invitation to remake the game in a more democratic way. It pays special attention to baseball’s role in the reconstruction of American identity after September 11, 2001. This study is framed by a discussion that links the development of baseball to the discourses of innocence and purity in 19th-century America. From there, it examines ritual performances at baseball games; a traveling museum exhibit sponsored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum; the recent debate about the use of performance-enhancing drugs; the return of Major League Baseball to Washington, D.C., in 2005; and the advent of the World Baseball Classic in 2006. 

Butterworth argues that by promoting myths of citizenship and purity, post-9/11 discourse concerning baseball ironically threatens the health of the democratic system and that baseball cannot be viewed as an innocent diversion or escape. Instead, Butterworth highlights how the game on the field reflects a more complex and diverse worldview, and makes a plea for the game’s recovery, both as a national pastime and as a site for celebrating the best of who we are and who we can be. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9780817383978

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RHETORIC, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE

SERIES EDITOR

John Louis Lucaites

EDITORIAL BOARD

Richard Bauman

Barbara Biesecker

Carole Blair

Dilip Gaonkar

Robert Hariman

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity

The National Pastime and American Identity During the War on Terror

MICHAEL L. BUTTERWORTH

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2010

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Bembo

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Cover: © Carlos Santa Maria | Dreamstime.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Butterworth, Michael L.

   Baseball and rhetorics of purity : the national pastime and American identity during the war on terror / Michael L. Butterworth.

       p. cm. — (Rhetoric, culture, and social critique)

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-0-8173-1710-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8397-8 (electronic) 1. Baseball—Social aspects—United States. 2. War on Terror—2001-2009. I. Title.

   GV867.64.B88 2010

   306.4′83—dc22

                                                                                                                 2010005579

For mom and dad, both of whom were gone too soon

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Rhetoric and the American Game

1. Ritual in the Church of Baseball: Performing Patriotism at the Ballpark

2. Baseball as America: Nostalgia and Public Memory through the National Pastime

3. Purifying the Body Politic: Steroids and the Rhetorical Cleansing of Baseball

4. Headed for Home: Bringing Baseball Back to the Nation's Capital

5. Making the World Safe for Baseball: American Mission and the World Baseball Classic

Conclusion: Reconstituting the National Pastime

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book has been nearly ten years in the making. It began with an idea I had about the performances of God Bless America that had become commonplace in baseball stadiums after September 11, 2001. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, these seemed to be appropriate expressions of grief and healing. Yet by the following baseball season, they had become troubling rituals that contributed to the excessive nationalism gripping the nation at the time. That summer, I e-mailed Bob Ivie at Indiana University to ask if a critical analysis of these performances would be appropriate for his upcoming seminar, Rhetorical Critiques of the War on Terror. He gave me the go-ahead, and the paper I wrote for his course eventually became the cornerstone of this book.

I am privileged to have worked with Bob, as well as John Lucaites, Robert Terrill, and C. L. Cole from the University of Illinois, each of whom balanced thoughtful critique with positive encouragement. I am grateful for their guidance and continued collegiality. Bob, in particular, remains a trusted source of wisdom and support, and his attitude toward scholarship has provided a model that I hope is reflected in this book.

Since 2006, I have been on the faculty at Bowling Green State University in the School of Media and Communication. I am surrounded by excellent colleagues at BGSU, especially those in the Department of Communication. In particular, I want to thank my fellow junior faculty members Josh Atkinson, Stephen Croucher, Sandra Faulkner, and Ellen Gorsevski for their friendship and support. In addition, I wish to acknowledge the guidance and mentorship I have received from Lynda Dixon, Lara Lengel, and Terry Rentner.

Also at BGSU, I have participated in a writing group that is part of the Institute for the Study of Culture in Society (ICS). Some portions of this manuscript were reviewed in our workshop, and I am thankful for the feedback I received there from Jonathan Chambers, Kim Coates, Radhika Gajjala, Scott Magelssen, and Vicki Patraka. And I especially want to thank ICS colleague Clayton Rosati, whose advice and friendship is deeply appreciated.

Others who have read portions of this book include Andy Billings, Bob Krizek, Ray Schuck, and Ross Singer. My thanks to these terrific scholars and friends. Andy and Bob, in particular, have been trusted mentors in the growing area of study in communication and sport. This area has steadily gained acceptance and respect in scholarly organizations such as the National Communication Association and the American Educators of Journalism and Mass Communication. Accordingly, I want to acknowledge the influence on my work of innovative scholars such as Toby Miller, Michael Real, Nick Trujillo, Leah Vande Berg, and Larry Wenner. In addition, for a variety of conversations based on the relationship between communication and sport, I want to thank Doug Battema, Bob Brown, Bryan Denham, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Tonia Edwards, Dan Grano, Kelby Halone, Michael Hester, Davis Houck, Heather Hundley, Vicky Johnson, Abe Khan, Jeff Kassing, Vikki Krane, Jon Kraszewski, Kurt Lindemann, Lindsey Meân, Korryn Mozisek, Dave Naze, Tom Oates, Michael Pfahl, and Paul Turman.

Of course, I am indebted to those at The University of Alabama Press and the Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique series who were patient guides throughout the process of submitting, revising, and finalizing this manuscript. They also provided practical advice at those moments when I lost sight of how the process should work. Series editor John Lucaites, meanwhile, offered incisive and specific commentary when it was most required. Among them, I have been assured that the book has been guided by sure hands. In addition, I want to thank the two reviewers who offered their thoughtful and, at times, challenging critiques. We may not have agreed on all concerns, but the book is surely better for their insight.

Portions of some chapters have been published previously in academic journals. Chapter 1, Ritual in the ‘Church of Baseball,’ is based on my essay Ritual in the ‘Church of Baseball’: Suppressing the Discourse of Democracy after 9/11, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2 (June 2005): 107–29; and chapter 3, Purifying the Body Politic, was developed from Purifying the Body Politic: Steroids, Rafael Palmeiro, and the Rhetorical Cleansing of Baseball, Western Journal of Communication 72 (April-June 2008): 145–64.

For the many others in academia who have positively affected my work, please know that you are appreciated, even if I cannot name every person here. Outside academic circles, I have been given immeasurable support from my family. My sister, Christine, a gifted writer and English professor, has long been my greatest confidante and friend. My parents, to whom this book is dedicated, were brilliant and passionate, yet troubled souls. For many reasons, life never quite worked as either of them had hoped; nevertheless, they imparted a great deal to their children. I am forever grateful. Most crucially, my academic career would not be possible without the support of my wife, Gina. The logic of academia eludes her—this is academia's fault, not hers—but she has not wavered in her confidence in my abilities. I cannot thank her enough. And it is with her that I have shared in the most rewarding experience of all, being parents to our children, Emily and James. Emily was born when I was writing my dissertation; James was born as I was completing this book. They have given me indescribable joy and wonder; I've at least given them baseball. At some point, I figure, it'll even out.

Introduction

Rhetoric and the American Game

In baseball, democracy shines its clearest.

—Ernie Harwell

The home run still seems as if it were yesterday. Sitting directly behind home plate in Miller Park's upper deck, I watched Mark McGwire come to bat for St. Louis in the top half of the second inning. By this time, McGwire's place in baseball history had been solidified as the man who conquered Roger Maris's single-season home run record in 1998. On this night, an oft-injured McGwire provided one of the few attractions for a Milwaukee crowd that had little else to cheer. With one runner on, pitcher Jamey Wright delivered a fastball that McGwire launched to straightaway center field. When the ball reached the scoreboard—nearly 450 feet from home plate—it seemed as though it was still rising. My wife and I, the happy beneficiaries of a local ticket promotion, sat in disbelief. I was certain it was the hardest ball I had ever seen hit. The crowd buzzed with excitement, even though it meant the hometown team now trailed in the game. The Brewers fell that night, 8–0. But it had been a beautiful summer evening, and on the drive home we could not stop talking about that mammoth home run. This was the beauty of baseball, we agreed; it took so little to make everything seem so right. That was September 10, 2001.

If the joy of a summer evening at the ballpark can create the illusion that all is right with the world, then it was surely shattered the next morning when terrorists seized commercial airplanes and flew them into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the nation's capital. The simple pleasure of a home run offered little comfort in the face of such deep pain and confusion. That day, like so many other Americans, I sat before my television horrified yet unable to turn away. I canceled my classes at the college where I taught introductory communication courses. My wife, worried that her office building—Milwaukee's tallest—could be a target, rushed home. Together we sat, once again, in disbelief. As we tried to make sense of what had happened, our thoughts eventually turned to baseball. Only one night earlier we sat innocently and contentedly, oblivious to the world beyond the diamond. Now, everyone on television told us that our world would never be the same. After September 11, 2001, it would take so much to make anything seem right again.

To imply a connection between terrorism and baseball may initially seem preposterous, contrived, or even crass. Yet I have returned to that Milwaukee-St. Louis game many times in my memory. Years later, it lingers in my mind as a snapshot of an America before 9/11. As a sports fan, I am invested in the mythology of baseball as the national pastime. As an American, I am struck by the contrast between the promised democratic ideals embedded in the game and the harsh reality of its inequities and injustices. Yet upon reflection on George W. Bush's war on terror,¹ it is as a rhetorical critic that I turn to the interconnectedness of terrorism and baseball. This is not some academic nod to baseball and apple pie as shallow symbols of presumed American ideals. Rather, it is a recognition that baseball is a rhetorical phenomenon that contributes to the construction of American interpretations of democracy, citizenship, and nationhood. In short, baseball is a prominent institution through which we can read and contest American public culture.

This book, therefore, is about baseball, its role in American culture, and the state of democracy in the years after September 11, 2001. It is about the games on the field and the stories about them. It is about history and myth. It is about owners, players, and fans, about politicians and citizens. Most of all, it is about the rhetorical struggle over what baseball means to the American people, and whether or not it is capable of fulfilling its democratic promises. After the tragic morning of 9/11, baseball's significance in the United States was featured in notable ways. All too often, it depended on rhetorics of purity that constituted Americans as innocent and virtuous, thereby amplifying the myth of American exceptionalism that has long characterized U.S. identity. Especially in the wake of 9/11 and the rhetorical construction of the war on terror, however, baseball's complicity in this exceptionalist narrative provoked concerns about how best to envision and enact democratic politics. This book, therefore, is both a critique of baseball in the early twenty-first century and an effort to contest the discourses that contained and restricted our democratic imaginations.

That baseball is a metaphor for democracy is not a new idea. As early as 1911, Albert Spalding declared that baseball was a democratic game.² Legendary manager Connie Mack called it democracy in action.³ More recently, former news anchor Tom Brokaw commented, Baseball has an enduring connection to the idea of America because it really is an extension of democracy.⁴ Are these proclamations about baseball's democratic character necessarily incorrect? No, because the game's history can boast many democratic triumphs. Without question, even as it perpetuated problematic conceptions of race and gender, the national pastime nevertheless has earned its reputation for welcoming a far more diverse population than any other sport or many other cultural institutions. When Jackie Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, for instance, few could dismiss the significance of baseball in American culture. However, this metaphor is only partial, often omitting baseball's darker history and its democratic failures. To view metaphor as partial is not to dismiss it. As Kenneth Burke reminds us, A world without metaphor would be a world without purpose.⁵ The key question thus becomes: for what purpose, or purposes, do we turn to metaphor? In the case of baseball, what is at stake when we view the game as a metaphor for the nation?

I argue here that there is a great deal at stake, particularly when baseball is understood in its political and cultural contexts. In the aftermath of 9/11, Donald Fehr, head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, noted, The events of September 11 left all of us horrified, and none of us untouched. Baseball and America have always gone together, and now, as the country moves forward to relieve the suffering and heal the wounds, everyone in the baseball community wants to go along.⁶ In the subsequent years, as images from 9/11 gave way to the war on terror, baseball was deployed for multiple metaphorical purposes: as a model for national solidarity, as a link to a nostalgic past, as a redemption of collective innocence, as a vehicle for rehabilitating national symbolism, and as a site for international missionary work. As a metaphor for the nation, then, baseball served as a concomitant discourse to the larger rhetorical performances of President George W. Bush and American responses to terrorism. Francis Beer and Christ'l De Landtsheer contend that the power of metaphor is the power to understand and impose forms of political order. Metaphors reflect, interpret, and construct politics.⁷ More than simply reflecting politics and culture, baseball as rhetoric articulated with a political order that justified preemptive military action, dictated the terms of democratic governance around the world, and restricted democratic practice within the United States. In short, baseball was a pivotal rhetorical resource in the quest for purity in post-9/11 America.

Bush himself demonstrated an awareness of baseball's rhetorical capacities during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Better stated, his campaign understood that equating Bush's ethos with the national pastime was both dramatic and persuasive. On the evening of September 2, the president delivered his speech accepting the Republican Party's nomination for reelection. Immediately preceding this moment, then-Senator Fred Thompson narrated a video that celebrated President Bush's character and leadership in the wake of 9/11. These purported strengths were symbolically located in two specific sites: Ground Zero and Yankee Stadium, both in New York. In a campaign that invoked 9/11 with regularity, it should surprise no one that Ground Zero was featured prominently in the video. But baseball? Almost as if responding to potential skepticism, as well as foreshadowing later parts of the narrative, Thompson asked rhetorically, What do a bullhorn and a baseball have in common? What truths can they tell? Which is another way of saying, ‘What did George W. Bush do? Who did he become? And, how did that help us?’⁸

The subsequent story of Bush's presidency was told through the metaphor of baseball, with the president's appearance at the 2001 World Series serving as a representative anecdote for American resolve and strength.⁹ In Thompson's words: "It was October 2001. America had just been hit, and America was uneasy. And some were afraid. He knew. There was a baseball game, the World Series, and it was held in New York. New York was trying to come back. And he knew. And suddenly the White House was calling the mayor's office, which was calling Yankee Stadium. It was the first night of the big series in New York, and look who arrived at Yankee Stadium." As Thompson spoke, images of Bush's appearance in Yankee Stadium, including his meeting with superstar Derek Jeter, played on the screen before the enthusiastic convention delegation.

The idea that the president innately knew something about what Americans needed during this time of crisis was provided as evidence of Bush's intangible qualities of leadership. But these qualities were concretized in a moment of action, not in the Oval Office or the Situation Room, but on the baseball diamond. Thompson continued: He was wearing a heavy secret service bullet-proof vest, and he could hardly move his arms. But he knew. So George Bush took the mound. What he did that night—that man in the arena—he helped us come back. That's the story of this presidency. With the heart of a president, he told us, ‘You keep pitching. No matter what, you keep pitching. No matter what, you go to the mound, you find the plate, and you throw. And you become who you are.’ With those words, the video came to an end, eliciting a rousing ovation from the Republican faithful. Moments later, George W. Bush began his speech to the nation.

In total, approximately one-third of the seven-minute production was dedicated specifically to baseball. Given that the narrative's structure emphasized the president's World Series appearance as the final, and most dramatic, illustration of his virtue, it is clear that the Bush campaign consciously used the national pastime for rhetorical effect. On the one hand, baseball appears as metaphor in the conventional sense—that is, the game serves as a model of national character and unity in a time of crisis. In this way, the metaphor functions primarily as a familiar and persuasive rhetorical device, as a means for illustrating an otherwise abstract idea about leadership. Yet, on the other hand, the convention video also depends on a constitutive logic that hails baseball as a means for shaping attitudes and behaviors. In other words, Bush did not throw the first pitch at the World Series merely to exploit baseball as a clever persuasive strategy. Instead, the video tells us that the very act of throwing from the Yankee Stadium mound that evening transformed the man himself. From this view, baseball not only shaped the Bush administration, it defined it. The 2004 campaign video, then, demonstrates that baseball as political metaphor functions in complex and powerful ways.

My aim in this book is to redirect the available interpretations of baseball as a national metaphor. More than just isolating the metaphorical meanings ascribed to the game throughout its history, this study is a critique of various efforts to articulate the national pastime with problematic political attitudes. In the wake of 9/11, American political culture turned militant, arrogant, and belligerent in its attitude toward foreign nations and its own citizens who dared to challenge the legitimacy of a war on terror. It constituted its identity through clear divisions between us and them, good and evil, and pure and contaminated. Consequently, as its leaders proclaimed their dedication to freedom and democracy, the United States ironically stifled democratic expression and devalued democratic diversity. The end of this project is not, however, merely to discredit U.S. policy and baseball's role in the war on terror. Rather, in the spirit of Burke's comic corrective, I see this book as an effort toward reinvention, a means by which we can better envision baseball as the democratic playing field it so often is pronounced to be. It is an engaged critique, one that asks its readers to challenge taken-for-granted notions about sport and American culture and to create new possibilities for democratic life.

Let me begin with a clarification: I do not argue in this book that baseball caused Americans to support the war on terror. Not only would such claim grant far more persuasive power to baseball than would be appropriate, it also would depend on a rather instrumental view of rhetoric. As the previous discussion of the 2004 Republican Convention video illustrates, rhetoric can, indeed, be viewed instrumentally. Persuaders do select rhetorical strategies and figures of speech with the explicit intention of inducing particular responses from audiences. Yet my approach in this book is grounded primarily in a constitutive model of rhetoric, which privileges identification over persuasion as the key to unpacking the rhetorical nature of public argument.¹⁰ Maurice Charland contends that a constitutive rhetoric elicits its effects not through explicit cause-effect relationships but through its ability to call its audience into being. As he explains, What is significant in constitutive rhetoric is that it positions the reader towards political, social, and economic action in the material world and it is in this positioning that its ideological character becomes significant.¹¹

Importantly, this ideological work does not occur only through formal rhetorical speech. Rather, in Burke's words, "we must think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill."¹² From this view, rhetoric's effect is a product of multiple forms and directions of expression. In the subsequent pages, although I do focus on some instances of public address—the 2004 State of the Union, for example—more of my attention is given to the rhetorical dimensions of public sites such as baseball stadiums and museums, as well as the discourses that circulate in politics and popular media. In so doing, I situate rhetorical criticism within a tradition of scholarship that shifts critical attention from a logic of influence to a logic of articulation.¹³ As cultural studies scholars have explained, articulation is a process by which apparently unrelated discourses become interconnected, which, in turn, results in the redefinition of those discourses.¹⁴ Rather than producing a linkage between discourses that can be understood as determined, absolute, and essential for all time, articulation occurs in the context of a sociocultural conjuncture, which constitutes a particular historical moment as a kind of unity.¹⁵ To feature articulation as a methodological perspective within rhetorical criticism, then, requires an engagement with the cultural and historical factors that give rise to discourses at specific moments in time.¹⁶

In this book, I employ a logic of articulation to argue that two apparently unrelated discursive communities—politics and sport—together depended on rhetorics of purity to justify America's standing in the world after 9/11. I do not believe that either politicians or Major League Baseball officials consciously sought to feature the national pastime as a component of U.S. foreign policy. Nevertheless, baseball's historical place in American culture provided the basis for an articulation with American aims during the war on terror. In the subsequent chapters, I map the articulations between the national pastime and the Bush administration's rhetoric. This approach is supplemented by rhetorical and political theory that enables a more comprehensive engagement with the specific discursive elements that are analyzed in each chapter. In addition, I detail the conditions that constituted the political culture in which each of these elements emerged. Before turning to baseball discourses located in the contemporary sociocultural conjuncture, however, I first examine the historical relations between baseball and American politics that allowed it to be a potent rhetorical resource in the first place.

Baseball and American Exceptionalism

Still revered as the American game, baseball has been a rhetorical resource for the production of American identity almost since its advent in the 1840s. Charles Springwood notes that people have been hailing baseball as the very essence of America since the game emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century.¹⁷ As early as 1856, baseball achieved its status as the national game through various newspaper accounts. That year, the New York Mercury referred to the game as the national pastime.¹⁸ In 1859, Harper's attempted to determine whether baseball or football deserved to be called the national game.¹⁹ Then, in 1860, a Currier and Ives political cartoon called The National Game articulated baseball with politics.²⁰ The need for such a conversation revealed, in Harold Seymour's words, the adolescent pride of a young nation.²¹ Indeed, the American public invested much in the notion that a sport could demonstrate the nation's collective character. Many early clubs reflected this spirit by adopting patriotic nicknames such as American, National, or Union.

Yet it was only in the wake of the Civil War that baseball became a quintessential institution of American identity. It is an understatement to claim that the United States was a fractured nation after the war. Among the resources promoted in the recovery effort was baseball. When baseball became a symbol of reunification, the game produced a rhetorical effect through which the national pastime was seen as a gateway to peace, unity, and democracy.²² The democratic imagination fostered through baseball, therefore, was temporally located in the landscapes of preindustrial America. Thus, even in its earliest days, baseball was upheld as a reminder of a simpler, more innocent time. Today, the national pastime remains a nostalgic repository, a recollection of the America we have lost.²³

As historian Jules Tygiel notes, our contemporary interpretations of baseball too often depend on this nostalgia in order to describe values and attributes that Americans have grafted onto baseball after it became embedded in our culture.²⁴ In this way, both the origins and the continued resonance of the national pastime are products of a rhetorical struggle over the kind of nation the game should represent. Baseball as we know it today began in 1846, with the first organized contest taking place at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey.²⁵ The game grew quickly from there, with no fewer than fifty teams playing in New York alone by the end of the 1850s.²⁶ This rapid development took place largely within the big cities of the East Coast, including New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. That baseball's origins are primarily urban, however, is a fact often obscured by more romantic notions that mythologize the pastoral spirit of the game.

As Springwood notes, baseball has been central in discursive practices that rely on tropes of the pastoral countryside.²⁷ Hailing a tradition identified with Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, and Alexis de Tocqueville, among others, baseball proponents eagerly promoted the agrarian essence embedded in the game. To this day, ballparks are celebrated as pastoral sanctuaries, providing safe havens from the world outside. Yet the innocence implied by this environment is anything but, as pastoralism privileges a homogeneous, white, masculine identity. As Michael Novak states, In baseball . . . the form of Anglo-American culture, particularly of rural culture, is almost perfectly reflected.²⁸ Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, the world outside the ballpark became increasingly urbanized and industrialized. The perceived threat of cities and their diverse populations facilitated the growth of baseball as a symbol of America's authentic, pure identity. Understanding the rhetorical production of baseball as symbol of purity in the nineteenth century, therefore, is crucial for critiquing the rearticulation of American purity in the twenty-first century.

The emergence of baseball as the national pastime paralleled another significant nineteenth-century development. George Marsden describes the years between 1865 and 1890 as a time of evangelical empire in the United States.²⁹ During this time period, American identity became increasingly linked to Protestantism. Significantly, Marsden notes, In 1870 almost all American Protestants thought of America as a Christian nation.³⁰ This identification found support through the growth of organized sport, especially baseball. Just one year after the national pastime became part of the lexicon, the Saturday Review introduced the concept of muscular Christianity, an articulation of athletics with evangelical Christianity that embraced manliness, morality, and patriotism.³¹ Rapid industrialization at this time facilitated an economic rationality that Max Weber first identified as a Protestant work ethic.³² Stated simply, American workers embraced a spirit of capital accumulation justified by the Calvinist principle that wealth was a symbol of their predestination as God's chosen people. As Richard Hughes identifies, this ethos has been extended comfortably to include all of America as a chosen nation.³³ Meanwhile, "as the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism shaped economic behavior, a derivative Protestant sport ethos emerged to influence the spirit, the forms, and the meanings of sport and recreation."³⁴

During this time, baseball quickly became professionalized. Despite the efforts of early organizers to prevent the masses from polluting