It’s about love and work
Ever since July 20, 1858, when an admission fee was first charged for watching a baseball game, our national pastime has been both a sport and a business. “Too much of a sport to be called a business,” Cubs’ owner Phil Wrigley once said, “and too much of a business to be called a sport.” But unlike Microsoft, Amazon, or Tesla, baseball is everyone’s business.
At every field across our land, from sandlot to stadium, the double paradox is the same: some must work so others can play, and others must play so some can work. There are workers like the groundskeepers, whose labors affect the play; and there are workers like the hot-dog vendors, whose livelihood stands apart from the play but derives totally from it.
Entrepreneurs and employees, functionaries and hustlers, baseball embraces them all. They have chosen to work in baseball or its periphery not because it holds out the promise of vast riches, although for a select few it may, but because their toil allows them to be part of the game. The sense of vicarious and communal celebration that binds a nation of fans likewise bonds baseball’s workers with its players.
Could a hawker of peanuts and pennants as easily sell ice cream from a truck, or refrigerators at Walmart? Sure, and more profitably, too — but peanuts and pennants get him into the park. For a dealer in baseball cards, at a memorabilia show or via the internet, the story is the same, but his “park” is the larger one that Bart Giamatti termed “the green fields of the mind.”
Baseball requires no oath of loyalty or love from its workers, but none is required. You can see how they feel about the game — the ticket takers and basepath sweepers and soda sellers — by looking at the spring in their step and the beam of their faces. These folks are past being players, yet more than fans; if life is, as Freud said, love and work, they have made baseball their life.
The baseball life can mean moving from player to manager to front office, like a Connie Mack or Clark Griffith, or more recently a Craig Breslow or Chris Young. But the baseball life is also moving from Little League player to booster to scoreboard operator to banquet organizer. The baseball life is is a life of play, masquerading as work.
The Baseball Life was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.