The most jarring thing about this year’s World Series—after the bizarre calls, new rules and enervating rain delays—was the way the Fox Channel chose to package the beginning. By the beginning, I mean the media prelude to “The Star Spangled Banner.” At the end of a deeply moving video montage of past highlights and especially moving moments in prior World Series from the television age (and yes, I am a sucker for the end-of-the-Olympics video montage that never fails to elicit tears from me, every four years), a very brief audio montage was offered, one in which John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s voices are woven together into a brief statement from—of all people, John F. Kennedy. Obama and McCain together… on Fox. What in the world was going on?
Kennedy’s statement is rather aphoristic, and without any context it is hard to discern the point. “I believe that baseball and America will both endure,” he says. Um, was there serious doubt about either?
Apparently there is. The video montage also gestured toward earlier decisions to continue playing baseball in moments of crisis—like Roosevelt’s enthusiastic support for continuing to play baseball during the Second World War, even as many Major Leaguers went overseas to fight.
It seems that the Fox network has become convinced that the current economic crisis (or else an imminent Obama election) rises to that level of crisis. And there has been other evidence to suggest the same of late. International stock markets are now moving in ways even the experts call “bewildering and unprecedented.” Oil prices have gone down, the dollar is strengthening, and home sales (at least among non-new homes) rose over 5% in September… and yet every piece of what would normally be perceived as good news receives a bad interpretation right now.
OPEC will respond to falling prices by cutting production and we can’t absorb that. A strong dollar will make it even harder for our goods to get into overseas markets. While we are selling more homes, their median value has dropped at a staggering rate. The use of the word ‘recession’ is finally accepted as accurate, and one begins to hear the word ‘depression’ whispered. In such a time, even silver linings now look like new thunderheads approaching. Our anxiety clearly runs very deep.
Why, then, offer a pep talk that links the shifting fortunes of the nation to the future of baseball? God knows that Ken Burns made the history of the game look like a veritable metaphor for the ever-shifting nation its citizens playfully imagine.
And George Will, who is nothing if not doggedly consistent in most of his political commitments, has done an elegant job of exploring and explaining the close connection between baseball and democracy. The best team in the major leagues, Will reminds us, will lose nearly half of its games. Baseball is an exhausting thing to care about, a continual source of heartbreak, an elaborate choreography of loss, and a sentimental education in what such losing means. To live in the Tampa Bay area is to know this already. How to lose with dignity, charity, and hope are baseball’s, and really all of sports’, perennial lessons.
It is this connection that makes me wonder about the message the Fox network was really trying to promote. Is it economic, or political, or both? Are we being told to be good losers as the federal government debates yet another bailout before getting the Attorney General’s office involved in rooting out the evildoers? Or are we being told to be good losers as the Democratic party anticipates sweeping success in five short days? These are questions to give one pause.
